Software As She’s Developed

I’m listening to this excellent BBC podcast on Unintended Consequences of Mathematics. In his book The Mathematician’s Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it [...]

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usual live blogging caveats – spelling errors, messy, etc etc @premasagar is visiting the Osmoplex today (thanks @jayfresh for arranging it) and is taking us through his work on iframes, widgets, and sandboxing. I’ve realised we could perhaps be collaborating as my jquery-iframe plugin is so close to his. Different emphases, but much overlap. GitHub is where [...]

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Okay, I'm currently ripsnort delighted to have found a solution to this problem of rendering SVG element dynamically. As in: My web apps receive some <svg>...<svg> from an Ajax call ??? Super, there's a drawing on the page!!! What is the secret sauce in step 2? After a merry frolic [...]

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Walking through Tiddlywiki source (write-up to follow), I noticed some interesting code in TiddlyWiki.js, importTiddlyWiki function. The code takes a string and injects into an IFrame. I had talked to Jon a little while ago about a similar problem and was wondering about it ever since. The technique here looks like this: It wraps the text with [...]

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This article explains iframe-to-iframe communication, when the iframes come from different domains. That you can do this effectively is only now becoming apparent to the community, and is now used in production by Google, Facebook, and others, and has powerful implications for the future of Ajax, mashups, and widgets/gadgets. I've been investigating the technique and [...]

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Update (2 days later): The site’s been popular - 10k+ views yesterday. Hit Delicious Popular and somehow got caught up in the German blogosphere, the greatest source of hits. Technorati it. There’s a good discussion in Ajaxian of the strengths and weaknesses of this technique. As with AjaxPatterns, which also reached Delicious Popular, it failed [...]

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Comet Takes to IE Like a Fish Takes to Acid Comet - or HTTP Streaming, if you will - is a little sensitive when it comes to portability, and I'll give you four guesses which major browser is causing the grief? Yeah, IE makes it difficult for two reasons: (a) IE's XMLHttpRequest component doesn't tell [...]

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A little while back, I mentioned that some people in the patterns community have been noticing the Ajax Patterns. In particular, there have been a series of discussions about the patterns by the Software Architecture Group in the University of Illinois Computer Science Dept (home of Netscape forerunner Mosaic btw). The SAG is led by [...]

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Ajax Basics 2 of 3 This is the second of three podcasts on the basic Ajax patterns. Podcast 1: Display Patterns and the DOM. Podcast 2: Web Remoting - XMLHttpRequest, IFrame Call, HTTP Streaming. Podcast 3: Dynamic Behaviour - Events and Timing. Podcast 2: Web Remoting (XMLHttpRequest, IFrame, HTTP Streaming) This 75 minute podcast covers web remoting concepts and the [...]

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Full drafts are now online for the two big Web Remoting patterns: XMLHttpRequest Call and IFrame Call. There are also a couple of new demos to illustrate GETting and POSTing with both call types: XMLHttpRequest Example, IFrame Example. A few extracts follow, but first, let me ask you: Do you know of any public IFrame remoting [...]

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