In the above-mentioned article, Costello says that "Remote Scripting is the process by which a client-side application running in the browser and a server-side application can exchange data without reloading the page. Remote scripting allows you to create complex DHTML interfaces which interact seamlessly with your server."

Often, Remote Scripting is asscociated with Microsoft and ASP or with a Java Applet. I wanted to avoid both, so this is my path. (There is also a popular implementation here.)

One of my computer science teachers in college was a retired IBM software engineer. To hear him tell it, when not colating punch cards or replacing vacuum tubes, he wrote operating system code in 1s and 0s. And now that he was a teacher of Java, he laughed at some of the "modern benefits and advances", such as code reuse, touted by the object oriented crowd.

In that spirit, I think most programmers would agree that using and incorporating other people's code, where and when allowed, is a perfectly acceptable and often helpful practice. Indeed, it's at the heart of open source in general and community knowledge websites like this one. So much of what I'll be demonstrating in this article is not of my own creation; the brainpower belongs to others. My job, as is often the case for web developers, was merely to glue the pieces together, and to "get it working."