ASP.NET has a number of ways to do AJAX. They include, though are not limited to, AJAX Control Toolkit, page methods, ASMX, and WCF Web Services that can be called directly from JavaScript, UpdatePanel
, ASHX generic handlers, WCF Data Services, MVC Controller actions, and more. For the purpose of this book, we'll just have a brief look at two of these, to compare and contrast.
The first is UpdatePanel
, which is generally out of favor now, but demonstrates the benefits of clean AJAX over excessive abstraction, which is important to keep in mind.
The second example is the page method (or WebMethods
), which is similar to one of the AJAX options that Ext.NET includes, which we will look at in depth later.
Later examples will show how we can take advantage of existing ASP.NET features, such as ASHX generic handlers, ASMX Web Services, and more.