February 14, 2006

ASP.NET: AJAX with Anthem

OK, here is my take on AJAX at this point in history: a lot of talk, a lot of work, and little reality.

But, I have found one library that I actually like for doing AJAXy stuff: Anthem
http://jason.diamond.name/weblog/2006/01/31/anthem-100

Why do I like this one: it is easy to implement. They didn't go out and recreate a bunch of controls, but inherited the existing standard ASP.NET control library. So if you want a AJAX dropdownlist instead of a standard dropdownlist, change your asp:dropdownlist to an anthem:dropdownlist; or, my personal favorite, change your asp:calendar to an anthem:calendar (no more full post backs just for selecting a day).

OK, there are a couple of other steps involved, but all told it amounts to 4 extra lines of code, and there is a nice set of samples to tell you everything involved.

Did I mention this is an open-source source forge project?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree. Easy to use and actually works out of the box.

Anonymous said...

Ditto. I love Anthem. I've also started using MyGeneration to handle all of my repetitive DAL or DAO work.