Software As She’s Developed

Abe Fettig’s done some important experimenting to arrive at a direct remoting technique, one which bypasses the need for a Cross-Domain Proxy and doesn’t rely on cross-domain On-Demand Javascript. Compared to the latter technique, Abe’s idea is more functional, because you get the power, expressivity, and bidirectional capability of XMLHttpRequest, as opposed to the On-Demand […]

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Today’s Ajax framework is JsRia. Yesterday’s was ZK, with the Backbase entries updated too. In the past week, there were Smartclient, Ajax JSP Taglib, Ajax JSF Framework, Cajax. Here’s the diff. The week prior to that saw introduction of XOAD, Rialto, and Lotus Notes info. Have the Ajax frameworks entered the enlightened age of singularity? (I’ve […]

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Matt @ 37Signals discusses new countdowns being used at pedestrian crossings (crosswalks). Did you ever count how many redundant messages are available at a pedestrian crossing? Good, let’s be sad together and count them, then. At a workshop one time, various attendees from different countries came up with a list of cues, something like the […]

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Uh, thanks for the heads-up. Reminds me of the presentation on user attention at Interact 2001, where the laptop suddenly interrupted proceedings with that legendary message, “You’re computer is now fully charged”. And, by way of contrast, how to write good error messages: tell the user what happened, explain the consequences if it’s not obvious, […]

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The Search Engine Experiment - a blind test where users rate relevance of results - reveals that Google is better, but not that much better. The methodology is reasonable - the only serious flaw might be if people are assuming Google is always relevant, then trying to pick the Google results. Or if people go […]

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I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined Dion, Ben, and Rob as an Ajaxian.com editor. Here’s Dion’s announcement: We are proud to announce that Michael Mahemoff of the popular AjaxPatterns.org has joined the Ajaxian.com team. Together, Ajaxian.com and Ajax Patterns is going to offer even more information for users of Ajax technology. Expect to see […]

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James Strachan: Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?: So is the web application of the future going to be static HTML & JavaScript, served up by Apache with Ajax interacting with a bunch of XML based web services (maybe using SOAP, maybe just REST etc)? If so, do we really need a web […]

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What manner of 19th century public domain dicitonaries are packaged with 21st century software? For Montogomery Burns, these word lists would be just spifflicastic, but maybe not for the average citizen. I just installed Thunderbird 1.5RC1, keen to check out the spell-check. Neither “blog” and “podcast” were recognised as valid words, despite one of the other […]

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Looking at the best practice/process patterns gave me some ideas for Ajax frameworks. Here’s a few thoughts. I know some frameworks already do some of these things, though most don’t, and none do all of them. Logging frameworks should provide a sensible default, ie log to a div, but allow for more flexiblity on the logging strategy, as […]

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Cool! The Best Practices/Processes Patterns are now complete. They are the final eight Ajax Patterns for now - “final” in the sense of “the list is not yet finalised”. The patterns had been sitting there unattended for about four months now. More details on the new patterns later, but here’s a quick summary … First, there’s a […]

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