Try these examples.

You will have to download them to your machine... they won't work where they are posted, that's just somewhere to post the files. Note I only tested these on FF on a Mac, but FF on windows should be equivalent. Don't know how well the IE bits will behave.

• A JSP page that returns text (or maybe XML, but that's a bit fancier and has a couple more hoops for learning-sake)... this text is a snippet of HTML code that will replace something on the page. You may can explicitly set the return type to "text/plain" here. If you go XML, you'll need "text/xml". Test this works by pointing directly at the JSP page and verifying you get plain text (or XML) but not a standard web page.


• A simplified HTML page with some javascript. For this part, just have a button with an onClick event. When pressed, it calls a function that just adds some HTML code under some existing object. Play around with:

  document.getElementById("some_div_id_here").innerHTML = "
  This is a test.
  ";



• Verify you can get the HTTPRequest to work ... in the function that handles the [successful] response, just have it pop up a window.alert("it works"); or something similar.


• Put these pieces together w/o worrying about the database yet; just return a fixed value. The response handling function sets the innerHTML of some element on your page to be the value of the responseText from the ajax resopnse.


• Convert the JSP page to get data it needs from a database, but carefully return info to the client in the same general format you already have working.