What is MX AJAX Toolbox?

1. What is MX AJAX Toolbox?
2. Bringing the benefits of AJAX to Dreamweaver
3. How MX AJAX Toolbox differs from other frameworks?
4. Creating sites with AJAX panels
5. Interactive AJAX controls and widgets
6. Increased productivity
7. What people think about MX AJAX Toolbox

MX AJAX Toolbox is a Dreamweaver extension created by InterAKT Online, that helps you build AJAX websites.

Note: If you are not familiar with AJAX (Asynchronous JAvaScript and XML), or if you want to get more familiar with it, please read the AJAX: Asynchronously Moving Forward article that answers questions like:

• What is AJAX?
• How does AJAX work?
• Why use AJAX?
• Is AJAX right for my project?
• Who's using AJAX?

Web applications that employ AJAX can be much more difficult and time-consuming to build than classic ones, because of the mix of technologies involved in development. This is where MX AJAX Toolbox comes to ease your work, by offering a visual development environment that is intuitive.

MX AJAX Toolbox is the first degradable AJAX development platform for Dreamweaver. It consists in a set of tools that allows you to solve two main use-cases:

1. Build AJAX sites from scratch (Rich Internet Applications) - with or without using a database connection.
2. Update legacy websites with interactive AJAX controls and widgets.

With MX AJAX Toolbox, you can build AJAX-enabled sites in a visual manner, without learning any programming languages or techniques, and following the usual workflow in Dreamweaver. The product provides a Rapid Application Development environment, thus reducing the need for hand-coding to a minimum.

To see the product in action and get a first impression about what it can do, check out the MX AJAX Toolbox demo site.

Where should I use MX AJAX Toolbox?

There are three types of applications that you can build or extend by using MX AJAX Toolbox, depending on the technical architecture and web development techniques that you plan to use:

1. AJAX applications that do not use a database to retrieve content. Such applications can use pure HTML, images, or flash movies for content. Examples include:
2. • Company presentation websites - see the Build a Company Presentation Website tutorial.
   • Personal websites
   • Travel blogs
   • Photo galleries - see the Create a Photo Gallery with Albums tutorial.
     
     
3. Database-driven AJAX sites.
   You can build dynamic AJAX applications for situations such as:
4. • Music stores - see the Build a Music Catalog tutorial.
   • Product catalogs
   • Company presentation websites - see the Build a Company Presentation Website Using AJAX Panels tutorial.
   • Sport events websites
   • Content Management Systems
     
     
5. Improve an existing site by adding interactive AJAX controls and widgets. If you previously developed a website (AJAX-based or not), you can any time improve or extend it by adding AJAX elements such as:
6. • Accordion
   • Photo gallery
   • AJAX Dynamic table
   • Collapsible region
   • Tabset
   • Dialog box
   • Rating
   • Suggest text field

Now that you got a general impression about MX AJAX Toolbox, continue with the next article sections to learn more about the product: the benefits it brings, how it differs from other AJAX frameworks, how to use it to its fullest in order to build the desired AJAX website, its compatibility with other development tools (server models, browsers, operating systems, databases).