Building the Behavioral Layer of an SMTP Client with Prototype
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Looking for new and productive ways to use the robust features that come packaged with the Prototype JavaScript library? Then look no further, since this set of articles might be what you're searching for.
Welcome to the second part of the series that began with "Building a SMTP client with Prototype." In three educational tutorials, this series walks you through the development of a highly expandable web-based email client, by using the remarkable functionality provided by the Prototype software package.
Looking back to the preceding article of the series, you'll recall that I started creating a simple front-end for this application, which became very useful for letting users enter basic data. This data included the email address corresponding to the main recipient, the subject and text of the message, and finally the group of additional recipients who should receive carbon copies (CC) and blind carbon copies (BCC) of the message.
Actually, the seemingly complex process that I described above was easy to perform, since it was limited to only a few straight CSS styles and some basic structural markup. However, as the title of the series claims, this SMTP client will use the Prototype JavaScript library to carry out some useful tasks, like requesting on the server a PHP file that really sends out the email message, as well as collecting all the data entered by the user in the corresponding web form.
As you'll see later on, all of these processes will be tackled with relative ease thanks to the functionality provided by the $ and $F functions included with Prototype and its robust "AJAX.Updater" and "Event.observe" classes.
So, having outlined the topics that will be treated over the course of this second article of the series, it's a good time to continue developing this SMTP client application, paying strong attention to building its behavioral layer.
Are you ready to continue learning how to build this email client application? Okay, let's begin now!
Next: Listing the presentation and structural modules of the SMTP client >>
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