I recently started developing a small PHP website to access a web service using AJAX.  Now, the last time I dealt with AJAX I using XML to communicate between client and server.  XML needed to be parsed and that usually meant additional time spent debugging.

I had heard of JSON, so I went over to http://json.org to understand how to implement.  It took me about 30 minutes to understand the syntax and another hour or two to implement.  I implemented a PHP page to access parameters via query string and return a JSON object.  I implemented an HTML page to consuned the JSON output by using prototype and eval function in JavaScript. I am so relieved that I no longer need to generate and parse XML. Whew!!!

The application works great.  Now I have a seen a lot of site that use animation to provide some feedback to the user that an AJAX request is being processed by the server.  I thought perhaps I can find one of those animations and plug it in the top right hand corner of my application.  I came across this great site: http://www.ajaxload.info/.  This site can dynamically generate over a dozen different progress indicator in the background and foreground color of your choice.