Can entire page be developed out of ajax in asp.net 3.5?

Question

My requirement is to develop a page with 4 sections, which cannot have a postback. Section 1. Content which can be changed on user click Section 2. List of users viewing the page online (Auto update when user leaves or visits the page ) Section 3. Chat for the users online Section 4. Rating the content and other functionality for Section 1

Please advise me how to go about it ? Also let me know if there are other easy options in this scenario. One of the options considered was GWT, dropped due to the fact that entire application is being developed in .nET

Any help regarding this will be highly appreciated. Freelancers willing to work on this will be highly rewarded.

Answer 1

Yes, this is entirely possible using MS Ajax.

Check out this book, which describes how to write entire web applications without using any postbacks:

http://www.amazon.com/Developing-Service-Oriented-Applications-Microsoft%C2%AE-PRO-Developer/dp/0735625913/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229457728&sr=8-9

Answer 2

It depends how you define the term "postback". Of course, you could design a whole application without a single postback, I'm not sure exactly how useful it would be unless it was for word processing or something.

Some people have commented that using the UpdatePanel is okay - well...that's not really without postbacks. An UpdatePanel posts the whole page back in the background, the ASP.NET webserver processes the entire page using the full page lifecycle, so it's not strictly no-postback.

I've got an application that I wrote that has no postbacks (if by no postbacks you mean, no visible full page refreshes) that communicates with the server using a number of UpdatePanels for each section of the page. You can also use the JavaScript XmlHttpObject to write your own AJAX calls to the server - once again, strictly speaking, this is still a postback it just doesn't visibly update the entire page in the user's browser. If you're using the JavaScript XmlHttpObject, it's fairly simple to make webservice calls.

Some good reading for this is:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972326.aspx
• http://debasishpramanik.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/calling-web-service-using-xmlhttp-object/