Software As She’s Developed

Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al’s Design Patterns and Alexanders’ equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as “replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality”. First, I want to note that the critique above surely defies belief to anyone who […]

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Man, JSON has come out of nowhere! I first came across it amid the Javascript hype in early '05, now it's everywhere. Not only in your Ajax apps, but in the On-Demand Javascript APIs of the world. Sharing an ethic of simplicity with Rails, it's not surprising these technologies have come closely together, with JSON support [...]

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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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I made a new Ajax toy. Web-O-Random is a random website finder with some Ajaxy goodness: Sites load into a carousel (slider) component. Thanks to Bill Scott and Yahoo! for providing the original component and Sebastien Gruhier for the prototype port which is used here. Pages load into an IFrame (as with WebWait). User can re-randomize, [...]

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  Just discovered Ajax Design Patterns has received the 2006 Editor's Choice Award from Linux Journal for books on software development. It's a personal honour, but it's also a sign of the groundbreaking role Ajax has played in 2006. Ajax Design Patterns, published by O'Reilly, assumes that you have a good idea of how HTTP, HTML, the [...]

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Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category - http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2. Thanks [...]

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Ajax/Javascript: 8 Ways to Create Graphics on the Fly - digg this The ability to create rich graphics on the fly is one of the critical gaps in Ajax. There are indeed techniques to do it, albeit far from perfect, and some are do-able today if you take a pragmatic view of things and keep graceful [...]

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Summary: Avoid $$(".classname") on large DOMs!!! I've recently been optimising the guts out of a JS webapp I wrote, which was making IE crawl to a halt. I discovered this after introducing a stress-inducing data set. (Using Rails' fixtures makes light work of this; since the fixtures are Ruby templates just like the web templates, it's [...]

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This is the fourth and final podcast in the series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). This 54-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 17, pp 473-530): Lazy Registration Direct Login Host-Proof Hosting Timeout Heartbeat Unique URLs Dynamic Favicons Dedicated to the Nitobians, whose last podcast inspired me to crank another one out again. Recent events [...]

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