General AJAX newbie question

[phpknight]

I am reading some books on AJAX and may use it in a future application along with PHP.  However, I do have one major concern.  I use the new Yahoo! Mail, and it frequently freezes or bugs out on me.  Is that something I should expect my application to do when using AJAX, or is Yahoo! Mail just poor programming?  M

 

y site obviously will not have the following of Yahoo!, and if all my mail were not already on there, I would just leave and not tolerate it.  So, I do not want my application to become a ghost town because it freezes or does not work properly.  Any advice would be appreciated from those who have a lot of AJAX experience.

[r-it]

the thing is, yahoo has too many ajax requests and traffic, and tht is the reason its freezing i think. At the start, you're gonna experience a headache with ajax, coz things just don't go your way on all browsers, but try and do a lot of exercises on it, or rather, think of ways you can use ajax on current projects then you'll be on the right track, but its gonna be hell at first

[Philip]

Like r-it said, yahoo has too many requests, that's why it freezes.

 

Depending on the size of your site where ajax will be placed, the physical size of your application(s) (how big the script is), and the amount of usage the script(s) will get, will all play a factor into how long the loading will take. I doubt that you're going to have to worry about freezing.

 

I might not have too much AJAX experience under my belt, but I do know a few things about it after playing around with it for a few weeks. It takes a lot of trial and error, especially if you haven't done much JS programming (like myself, I was strictly html/css/php, and didn't really believe in js since users can easily disable it.) You're going to find that IE can be a complete, well, pain in the ass, to deal with. Your script might work fine on other browsers, but then you'll get one that won't work. For me, it was IE, and still like 70% of the internet users use IE. Use a stat program, and see what percentage of users are using what browsers, then program off of that. Use that browser the most to do testing, but still test the others every now and then to make sure its still okay in them too. It will pay off in the long run, trust me. I thought I was done with it all, then I would go to IE and see nothing worked the way I wanted it to.

 

Sorry for the long post, hopefully it helped. And as always, remember: Don't be afraid to ask questions!

[phpknight]

Thanks for the input you two.  About the Yahoo! thing, it does not freeze and then work, it freezes and breaks.  I have to physically close the browser.  If Yahoo! just froze for a second, that probably would not bother me.  For instance, I might go to a folder, and my messages just say "Loading . . . ", but they never come up at all, even if I go to another folder and return.

 

I was thinking about using PEAR or something else for AJAX.  I will do most of the processing through PHP, not Javascript.  So, I am going to try to keep the Javascript to the absolute minimum.  I really cannot stand it.