Intro to AJAX (Udacity)

As part of the course, you’ll be building a web app that will help people learn about a place where they want to move! Your app will query the Google Streetview, Wikipedia and New York Times APIs!

This course is also a part of our Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree.

User experience is vital to the success of your website or web app. It’s important that the user’s experience be smooth and free of jank, yet the application will have to do things that take a long time to complete. AJAX allows app developers to interact with server-side APIs without pausing script execution or forcing the page to reload.

Plus, learning how to query data APIs will open you to a tremendous amount of free data that’s freely accessible. Want to build a flight tracking app? How about a photo gallery with image search? Or what about a tweet viewer? Just find an API that provides the data you need, read the documentation and sample code, and query away!

If you want to build solid and fast web applications, knowing how to query servers using AJAX is a must.

What You Will Learn

LESSON 1

Introduction

- What is AJAX?

- Why use an API?

- How can you identify AJAX requests in existing websites?

LESSON 2

Using APIs with AJAX

- Clone the Move Planner repository.

- Implement the Google Streetview API.

- Implement the NY Times API.

LESSON 3

AJAX and Your Projects

- What did you learn?

- How else can you apply AJAX to make speedy page loads?

- Customizing your sites.

Prerequisites and Requirements

Intermediate proficiency with JavaScript (equivalent to having finished JavaScript Basics).

Familiarity with HTML/CSS.