In this case, the file is just in a simple XML format that has an <images> tag with a set of <img> ags in it that hold the URL for each image. You can use whatever format you like, because the ontrol is not natively an Ajax widget. I’m writing the code that interprets the XML and creates each slide element in the carousel. The end result is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. The image carousel on the page

I can click the image and go to the page with the image (or to any URL I specify). Or, I can click the right or left arrow to scroll around the carousel to see more images. The effect is really quite impressive.

Conclusion
I showed you just a handful of the widgets and tools available on the Web both commercially and at no cost. Many of the tools I looked at while I researched this article didn’t use Ajax and as such didn’t fit into the topic. However, they were noteworthy on their own. In particular, I was impressed by the number of high-quality, open source WYSIWYG editors available for download. I often have customers frustrated when they have to use HTML in text boxes to get content onto their sites with bold, italics, links, images, and so on. These editors hide all the HTML and give users an editing feel that’s similar to a word processing application.

In addition to the WYSIWYG editors, you can find solutions for progress bars, tabbed dialog boxes, accordion controls, clocks, date pickers, RSS and Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) readers — even interactive terminal windows. Certainly, before you build your own DHTML or Flash controls, you should look at what’s available (often at no cost) on the Internet. With widgets such as these, you can add a lot of interactivity to your site without a lot of effort.