Regarding the code example in Chapter 1: I have tried it in IE and FireFox but the later displays a blank screen. I have made certain that JavaScript is enabled and have checked the Advanced JavaScript options but all variations on these settings give the same blank screen.

Any suggestions?

Hi,
   It should work - all my examples were tested in Firefox and IE. Can you tell me whether you typed in the code from the book pages, or whether you're using the code downloaded from the site. There shouldn't be a difference between the two but occasionally there is. Then we can take it from there.

Chris Ullman

Chris Ullman
Programmer/Technical Author
http://www.cuasp.co.uk

Chris,

The code in the book is fine.

I installed IIS locally and the book examples (which I had downloaded) work in both IE and FireFox. I had originally up-loaded the Chapter 1 example to my web site. Code on my site still does not work on FireFox but I will now look to my Service Provider rather than the code.

Love the book. I am trying to come up to speed on JavaScript and Ajax with a bit of PHP on the side in order to take on a new set of projects were time is of some concern, so I appreciate a good set of reference manuals.

Thank you
Lys Mykyta

Lys,

Glad to hear you are enjoying the book.

If it works on IE, then I'm not 100% sure that the fault lies with the service provider, although it's quite possible. My advice would be to jump ahead to chapter 6 - round page 162, and put some debugging alerts in, particular in the callback function getData and see what codes you are getting returned from Firefox. This won't hurt your understanding of the book.

Check that you are getting 200 from the status and 4 from the readystate and then go and query responseXML. If this is blank then try responseText. It could be that the server is returning the XML in a way that Firefox doesn't like, but it could be a problem with the setup, that IE is more tolerant of.

I sometimes wonder if the debug chapter shouldn't have been chapter 1, as Ajax apps while really useful can be quite finicky at times, and you've no idea how long I spent debugging some of the examples in the book. :-)

Chris



Chris Ullman
Programmer/Technical Author
http://www.cuasp.co.uk