Stone Coast Web Design's Weblog

A coworker passed along this link from IBM which provides a nice series of tutorials on AJAX. The example below is a classic example of how to use the XMLHTTPRequest object while checking for different browser types and then using the server's response for something.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
var request = false;
try {
request = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (trymicrosoft) {
try {
request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (othermicrosoft) {
try {
request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (failed) {
request = false;
}
}
}

if (!request)
alert("Error initializing XMLHttpRequest!");

function getCustomerInfo() {
var phone = document.getElementById("phone").value;
var url = "/cgi-local/lookupCustomer.php?phone=" + escape(phone);
request.open("GET", url, true);
request.onreadystatechange = updatePage;
request.send(null);
}