Summary

In this chapter, you took the skills you have learned thus far and applied them to building your own web-based widgets. This chapter showed you many practical widgets that Ajax makes possible.

First, you learned how to build a news ticker widget with PHP, DHTML, and Ajax to display news feeds in a scrolling format and auto-update itself. You also learned how to build a widget to consume the Weather.com XML service, transform the XML, and display the data to the user.

The chapter went on to describe how to create two widgets revolving around searches. The first widget displayed results from the MSN search service, which can output search results in RSS. Through PHP, this widget retrieved the search result feed and a static JavaScript object displayed the results to the user. The second search widget searched a blog's database using MSSQL. Using the C# JSON library, you learned how to build JSON strings and output them to the client.