Using AJAX to Build a Web Site Indexing Application with Prototype

Introduction

In order to refresh your memory of the topics that I discussed in the preceding article of this series, let me remind you that I started creating a simple front-end to let users submit information about their web sites, including the pertinent URLs, titles, and a few short descriptions about the sites' natures.

In addition, this front-end allowed you to display, on the web page, a list containing data corresponding to all the submitted web sites. In this way it implemented a simple indexing system that could be easily incorporated into either existing or future web applications.

However, although the basic user interface that I developed in the first article of the series might give you a vague idea of how this indexing system is going to work, the truth is that I need to appeal to the help of Prototype to implement a fully functional mechanism that really indexes web site data.

So, taking into account this requirement, over the course of this second tutorial of the series, I’m going to show you how to use the capabilities that come with Prototype to provide the application with the ability to add new web sites to the index, as well as to display the complete listing of sites that have been previously stored.

Having introduced all the topics that I plan to cover in this new tutorial, let’s continue building this Prototype-based web site indexing application. It’s going to be instructive indeed!