It’s finally time for a deep dive into the JavaScript library that powers the demonstration application in this series. The library provides Ajax handling, form validation, and unobtrusive JavaScript functionality, and it’s built so you can easily use any part of it in your own applications. I’ll take you through it line by line and function by function.

In addition, I’ll demonstrate a few techniques that will help you get the most out of the library. You’ll discover how to make Ajax calls using a view instead of an agent and learn how to simulate a slow-loading page to better understand how your page performs across different connections. Then, as a learning exercise, I’ll take you through several approaches to fixing a small bug in the example application — animated buttons that don’t animate properly in Internet Explorer (IE) browsers — and explain why conditional comments are the best solution.

I’ll wrap up by showing how the two forms in the demo application perform under load — first testing the form with the default Domino layout and then with the optimized form that uses the XHTML DIV layout set forth in Part 5 of this series (THE VIEW, January 2009). The performance improvement should be enough to convince you that it’s worth the extra effort to use a DIV layout.

If you are new to this series, I heartily recommend reading Part 2 (THE VIEW, September/October 2008) or investigating the download application to see what the sample Web forms look like and how they behave. For an overview of the series, please see the sidebar "Writing Efficient, Effective Web Code for Domino: The Series So Far."