Software As She’s Developed

I just made my first Google Gadget - a Digg roundup tool. Here are some quick notes on making a Google Gadget for Ajax developers. I assume you know Ajax and also that you've played around with iGoogle as a user. What's a Gadget? The gadget is an XML file sitting on your server. In [...]

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It's often a requirement for an Ajax app to "bust the cache", i.e. call a service and ensure its response comes direct and not from a cache. For all the talk of fancy header techniques, the easiest way to do it is by appending an arbitrary parameter, typically a random number and/or a timestamp i.e. [...]

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All the iPhone hype makes me wonder why so many smartphone/PDA apps still assume you're using a stylus, when you probably lost it last month, left it at home, don't have a hand free, or can't be bothered pulling it out. I, for one, welcome finger-friendly mobile UIs. Fat buttons please!

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It's an attribute as in <img alt="this is an *attribute*, not a tag"> and not <alt>, but 603,000 matches on Google (which apparently means about 750 pages) use the term "alt tag" along with countless other people, including me on occasion.

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Rails uses "whiny nil", which means if you call a method on an object that happens to be nil (null), you get an exception. This is good. But with strings in a web app (in any language), you often don't know if an empty string will be nil or simply zero-length (""). That's because some [...]

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Browsers would automatically pull in CSS and JS according to the filename and I would no longer have to look for an example every time I need a link or script tag. In the absence of any other spec, /abc/def.html would cause the browser to look for /abc/def.css and /abc/site.css and /site.css. And then it would [...]

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