Software As She’s Developed

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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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 seems that Ajax people have been profoundly touched by my April 1 Ajaxian post on the new Ajax timing mechanisms. Hopefully it will lead to a new age of enlightenment for humanity and finally a cool acceptance of the fearsome blink tag. On blink: ...And so it was that <blink>'s true purpose became known. Reborn as [...]

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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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It's cool to see Yahoo! posting a job for pattern curator: CURATE THE YAHOO! PATTERN LIBRARY Yahoo!'s Platform User Experience Design team is looking for a new curator for the Pattern Library. The curator works with designers from across Yahoo! to develop new patterns and to eventually migrate a pattern to the public library. You will be [...]

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The philosphy behind the Lazy Registration pattern is well depicted in this TechCrunch description of BlueDot. The key is that Blue Dot is useful to readers immediately without registering for an account. Readers who click on the Blue Dot link to save an article on a partner site see a small pop up box from which [...]

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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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Ajax Design Patterns is Book of the Month in this month's .Net mag (p.23, Issue 155, October, 2006). Incidentally, the mag is about the 'Net, not specifically MS .Net (which it pre-dates). The review says: So AJAX might be the hottest thing in programming since, er, ordinary Javascript, but it's no good just learning how to [...]

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.... Wherein our protaganist awakes to the power of CSS ... CSS is as important to Ajax as Asynchrony and XMLHttpRequest. Which is to say, it's very useful, even though it's not essential. Due to an accident of the English language, JJG's creative mind, and the propensity of certain terms to rise to buzzdom, it doesn't [...]

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