Software As She’s Developed

Dion’s cartoon resonated with me: Resonated because only last night I was thinking it’s about time I actually started playing with server-side Javascript, and wrote my first, extremely dumb, AppJet app. I will hopefully make it, like, actually do something at some stage. I’ve discussed the potential of server-side Javascript before, and the more I think about, […]

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CSS coding style doesn't get a lot of play. Most people are happy to stick with the convention of one property per line, like this: PLAIN TEXTCSS: #score {   background: yellow;   width: 12em;   border: 1px solid orange   padding: 2em;   margin: 3em 0;   display: none; } I, for one, can't stand that style. I'm heavily biased towards information-dense coding [...]

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<gush> Firebug is awesome. Joe Hewitt is a legend. As I've said before, Firebug is among the most usable software tools ever developed. I don't just mean compared to other software development tools. I mean against all user-facing software. It's single-handedly improved my Ajax productivity by at least 100% (that's my estimate when making changes to larger [...]

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Just mailed Joe Hewitt a couple of suggestions for the bug. Hi Joe, A couple of firebug suggestions. (1) Search On the Ajaxian interview, you mentioned people have trouble locating and knowing about the existence of Search. (Me too.) Redesigning the layout will help, but I'd also suggest retaining the standard alt/control-F shortcut somehow, as I'm sure a lot [...]

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Quick tip. Been playing with Adobe Air recently and was trying to let the user drag a "systemChrome="none" transparent="true" around. The definitive Air reference has an example that shows how to close and minimize, but not how to move it. And all the examples I could find are Flash-based rather than the HTML/JS/Ajax approach I'm [...]

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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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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's often a requirement for an Ajax app to "bust the cache", i.e. call a service and ensure its response comes direct and not from a cache. For all the talk of fancy header techniques, the easiest way to do it is by appending an arbitrary parameter, typically a random number and/or a timestamp i.e. [...]

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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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