The Iron Yard - Day 15

This is it…don’t get scared now…

We have driven deeper into this world of JavaScript and jQuery. Today we talked about review from last night’s login page homework. I did not have time to get it fully implemented because I went to a meetup and watched some blazing React.js happening. I mostly understood it, but today Aaron showed us some things that made a lot more sense.

We learned how to interact with a server using AJAX. Not the cleaner bleachy stuff, heavens no! Of course I mean Asynchronous Javascript And Xml. Everyone knows that!

This allows us to give information to the server, remove information, or update information. (A slew of other things are also available, but this is plenty for now.) Now, you might be saying, “Hold on, Tex. What is a server? You talking about my waiter at Chili’s?”

Great question! Most people have heard about things that are stored in the “cloud” and maybe they don’t fully understand what that means. A google search of the phrase “the cloud” returned “About 47,500,000 results.” SOMEONE is talking about it on the interwebs! The cloud is a great little marketing phrase for what used to be called servers. These are computers whose job consists of connecting other computers together and storing data. When you backup your iPhone to “the cloud,” it is really connecting to a remote computer somewhere that is holding a copy of your iPhone backup. To be fair, these days we are using a lot of wireless technology, so it does seem as if things are magically happening through thin air. Perhaps that is why the phrase has caught on.

Anyhow, as we learned AJAX a bit today, it becomes plain to see how useful it is. I can finally get a better picture of how our job as front-end developers is to build out a website and understand the ways in which it will interact with a server a.k.a. “the cloud.” Today we built a little chat utility in the browser using jQuery and AJAX that could store information in an object on the server and then retrieve that information in order to provide a running list of messages in a chat room.

We have some fairly complex projects coming up, so things are about to pick up quite a bit, I feel. Time to buckle down and continue the onslaught, come what may.

Written by Mike Mathew who lives and works in Dallas building useful things. Sometimes he posts on Mastodon. Mike also wears many hats at Presto Assistant where he is a co-founder, owner, and product engineer.