Introduction

Frequent visitors of ajax enabled websites, like ajaxian, have all witnessed them already: ajax rating widgets. They are flashy, animated, you can use them to rate the content (usually without refreshing the page) and if you could, you’d present them to your parents and marry them. Compared to the classic rating system, as on IMDb, they incite people to click them, reducing the effective rating process to only one click.
In this tutorial, I want to show you how to create the JavaScript framework to display the animated rating widget and how to connect it to your server backend by using some of the most common Ajax frameworks out there. I clearly separate the page creation from the JavaScript functions and the rating backend, to allow the script to be as flexible as possible and to be easy integrable into your existing website.
This tutorial is not meant to present you with a finished script (even though you could simply copy&paste the end result into your website and make it work without any problems), but rather to explain the design and implementation process that would enable you to create your own widgets if you’d need to. Getting started with the HTML markup

What It Is

This is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done all web 2.0-like with no page refresh. It is a major improvement on the previous version because it is now unobtrusive, meaning that if Javascript is off it will still work (although the page will refresh). You can also set the number of rating units you want to use (i.e. 4 stars, 5 stars, or 10 stars) on a rater to rater basis (see samples below or read the docs). A few other changes were made as well

Tags | Ajax, MySQL, Rating, Script