Software As She’s Developed

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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I'm all for Web 3.0 gadgetry in the browser, but how about some JS love for those ancient radio controls. It should be easy and portable to: * Get the current value of a radio group, without looping through each radiobutton to find the one that's checked! * Catch onchange events (no luck with IE). Right now, it's [...]

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This is the second in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). The guest for this week is Dave Johnson of Nitobi (the Ajax component developers formerly known as E-Business Applications), widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book. Dave helps me walk through the patterns and [...]

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And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We've already looked at the technical details, now we're looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features. I'm asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. [...]

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A pattern for your consideration, about using Ajax to help pages be RESTful. Problem How to personalize content and make pages cacheable and bookmarkable at the same time? Forces We want pages to have clean URLs that describe the main content being viewed. Doing so makes pages easily bookmarkable and send-to-friend-able, and also allows us to cache the [...]

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