To be frank, building simple networking programs with the assistance of AJAX can be done without minor problems. It’s possible to create a friendly front-end which can interact with the server via JavaScript to run different network utilities.

Part of this process was profusely explained in the first part of the series, where I went through the development of a basic graphical interface. The interface provided users with a group of buttons and an input box for running several queries against a selected Internet host.

Also, among the decent variety of network utilities that can be performed by this application, you can find the popular “ipconfig” and “netstat” commands (available on Windows-based systems), scanning TCP ports, searching DNS records, and many more. So the program in question can be used at least to perform basic tasks in real networking environments. That's pretty good, considering that all these processes are executed using only a web browser!

All right, now that you hopefully recall all the topics that were treated over the course of the preceding article, let me tell you what you’ll learn in this new tutorial. As you’ll probably remember, even when the user interface that corresponds to this application was completely developed, the group of JavaScript functions responsible for sending out queries in the background, along with displaying eventual results, remained undefined.

That’s precisely the subject of this second article of the series. In the next few lines, I’m going to show you how to define some simple JavaScript functions aimed at querying a given Internet host and returning the potential results to the browser.

This educational journey is just about to begin. Want to see how this story continues? Okay, let’s do it together!