Today I wrote my first bit of AJAX, although there wasn’t really any “X” involved, just a little nib of text to say whether a username exists.
This article got me to my first lightbulb moment, where I really GOT what I could do with all this wacky stuff. Today, it was, as could be surmised, calling to the database while setting up a new user for our online book exchange to see whether the requested username exists. I still have some work to integrate my work into the live application, but it was definitely a happy-dance moment to get it done.
You know how some things are just really simple, once they sink all the way in? This was like that. :) I had the same experience when I was first learning multidimensional arrays in PHP.
And in this case, the existing script already does the same check, once the form’s been submitted, so it works even w/out JavaScript enabled. (the $64,000 question: is it really accessible?)
On a tangentially related topic, I am definitely addicted to caffeine. ::sigh::