In a few short months, Ajax has moved from an obscure and rarely used technology to the hottest thing since sliced bread.
This article introduces the incredibly easy-to-use Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. This is not a step-by-step tutorial, and I assume that you know a little bit about how to organize and construct a Rails web application. If you need a quick refresher, check out Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 1 and Part 2.
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This chapter presents a few of the thousands of mashups you can find today on the Web. No one knows how many other mashups live behind corporate firewalls, but, chances are, the number is large. The mashups in this chapter were chosen to show the variety of the world of mashups. Some of them are proofs-of-concept, others are works-in-progress, and others are experiments. Others are actual, live products or marketing tools. Mashups often provide visualization of information, and, frequently, that visualization is in the form of interactive maps. The release of the Google maps API was a major factor in the interest in mashups, in large part because so much information lends itself to mapping. As you will see in later chapters of this book, new technologies grouped together as Web 2.0 and AJAX are the building blocks of mashups. In conjunction with APIs such as Google mapping, eBay, Yahoo!, Flickr, and others, you will soon be able to build your own mashups like the ones shown in this chapter.
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