Running a local development web server is one of the best ways of learning AJAX; reading up on it is one thing, but being able to pass the raw data back and forth between a browser and a server is really the only way to truly understand what is happening at a fundamental level. To create the dynamic and interactive apps and sites that we’ve come to know and love, you need a development server.

On Windows systems we really have only a few decent options available; we can use Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS), which is usually bundled with Ultimate or Business versions of Windows, or we can use Apache, the extremely popular open-source alternative. Remember when Microsoft enjoyed a 90% market share of the browser market? Apache is the MS of the web server world and at some points in its illustrious history has enjoyed almost total domination in its respective field.

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We’ve all seen the brilliant functionality on Mashable where news stories and interesting articles can be shared to social networking sites; the functionality is driven by the images accompanying the articles; you click and hold on an image and can then drag it into a toolbar to share it. It’s brilliant and intuitive, and in this article I’m going to show you how we can replicate this behavior with jQuery and jQuery UI.

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In this round-up we’ll be looking at 5 JavaScript libraries that can really ease the development of modern, attractive web sites. The libraries that we’ll be looking at aren’t libraries in the same sense as something like jQuery or the YUI; they’re much smaller and much more specialized. But they’re the best at what they do and provide unique functionality.

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In this tutorial we’ll be looking at how we can transform some semantic and accessible underlying HTML into an attractive and functional news ticker that smoothly scrolls its contents. Some news tickers are horizontal and some are vertical; the one that we’re going to create today will be vertical.

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In this tutorial we’re going to be using the jQuery UI slider widget to create an attractive and functional content slider. We’ll have a container, which has a series of elements each containing different blocks of content. There will be too many of these elements to display at once, so we can use the slider to move the different content blocks in and out of view.

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A couple of months ago, on our PLUS site, I wrote a tutorial focused on creating a static search engine that spidered down through a site hierarchy and searched each web page that it found for a given text string. This type of search was aimed at owners of web sites consisting of static HTML pages. In this tutorial + screencast we’re going to do the same thing, but this time instead of navigating folders and subfolders looking for pages, we’re going to search a database instead. Join today!

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In this tutorial, we’re going to be building an image scroller, making use of jQuery’s excellent animation features and generally having some fun with code. Image scrollers are of course nothing new; versions of them come out all the time. Many of them however are user-initiated; meaning that in order for the currently displayed content to change, the visitor must click a button or perform some other action. This scroller will be different in that it will be completely autonomous and will begin scrolling once the page loads.

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The Progress Bar is one of the latest components to be added to the excellent library of UI widgets and interaction helpers built on top of jQuery. It was introduced in the latest version of the library, which at the time of writing is 1.7.

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In this tutorial we’re going to be creating a widget for our web pages which allows visitors to search the contents of our site. We’ll be using jQuery to pass the search term to the back-end, and to receive and display the results. We’ll be using PHP to search for the term in a local site and then return any matching URLs back to the page as a JSON object. Join today!

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In this article, we’re going to look at how we create a simple but effective means of capturing and displaying visitor comments using a blend of jQuery, PHP and JSON. In the public forum that is the blogosphere, the ability to capture and display visitor comments on your blogs can give you instant feedback and opinions from the people that matter most – those that read your blog.

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