Software As She’s Developed

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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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 to […]

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On Ajaxian, Dion points to Sun’s Phobos project, an attempt to build a new platform for server-side Javascript. Phobos came out six months ago, around the time of the May Ajax Experience. No-one has taken server-side Javascript seriously since it died a premature death in the mid-90s. But there is great potential… Server-side Javascript would allow for […]

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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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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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This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: [...]

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