Author: Michael
Date: August 17, 2008 at 10:45 pm

Our JavaScript examples page has a demo AJAX quote generator application built using the Dojo Toolkit. It’s the only page on our web site that does not validate, outside of our blog (Wordpress theme validation is another topic for another day). It also does not follow our typical design philosophy. The page will not load properly in a browser that does not support JavaScript. It is a page that we’d never release to a client. So you might be wondering why we included it on our examples page, where we are supposedly showcasing our talent.

The reason is to demonstrate what is possible with JavaScript. In a real web site, the page would be generated using a dynamic server side platform such as PHP, and then the behavior would be added in using JavaScript. But since the purpose of the page is to demo what can be done with JavaScript and its ability to modify the Document Object Model, we wanted to maximize the amount of JavaScript used in the page.

The page template, column headers, and grand total are the only static parts of the page. Everything else is generated using client side JavaScript from a JSON source. Although our design for a client would be different, since the example is specifically intended to show JavaScript it seemed a reasonable trade-off to generate page content using JavaScript that would normally be generated server-side.

Even though it’s not something we’d actually do for a client project.

Please don’t hate us for it!

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