[Javascript] Ajax - or whatever you call it.

[qarnos]

I'm working on an assembly code documentation generator with the nifty (I think) acronym: EGADS! - Easy Generation of Assembly Documentation from Source.

I'd like to add a cool feature to the documentation which you see here and there on the web (such as the wikipedia popups) where hovering over a link will bring up a little pop-up box showing a preview of the contents. I believe this technology is called Ajax, but I might be wrong since I don't know much about it and really don't care to learn it for myself!

I was wondering if anybody on here would be able to help me out? I'm basically looking for someone to write the script for me. I'd like to be able to display a popup box containing the first line of the description and the input/output registers. This would be handy for quickly checking something in the docs if you've forgotten which registers do what.

If anybody is interested, reply in this thread or PM me is you wish. By way of thanks you get your name in the credits.

[kv83]

Hmmm... as far as I know that is not Ajax, but just "simple" javascript.

Ajax is a technology to change content without reloading the screen (to put it simple). All this is handled client-side with calls to the server (just like a real forms application).

A good example of Ajax is Gmail.

[benryves]

mootools is an excellent JavaScript framework. It even supports tooltips out of the box.

With the mootools tooltips, you could give each link a classname to identify it as a tooltip, and then store the tooltip contents in the title attribute. Like this:

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<a href="somelink.htm" class="tip" title="function_name :: This function does something awesome.">function_name</a>

To then add popups, you'd simply need this snippet of JavaScript:

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window.addEvent('domready', function() { new Tips($$('a.tip')); });

This doesn't use AJAX, and requires that the content is known beforehand. As you're outputting static HTML (rather than generating these documents on the fly using a server-side application), there isn't a huge advantage to using AJAX.

[Demon]

There's also JQuery and Prototype.
I heard that JQuery is really good.
I'm a Prototype guy for now. Takes a bit more code to do stuff with Prototype, but after seeing some of JQuery's examples, I'm really thinking about switching.