Software As She’s Developed

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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The fourth and final podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. As always, the patterns are online at AjaxPatterns.org and covered in the book too, now available at Amazon. This 33-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Performance Optimisation: Browser-Side Cache Maintain a local cache of information. Guesstimate Instead of grabbing real data from the […]

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It’s good to hear Rails 1.2 is all about embracing REST. Working with Ajax has helped me really appreciate the benefits of REST, and it all fits in with the Rails mindset quite nicely. Right now, we have URLs like /user/update/5 whereas REST would have it as /user/5 and then POST in the details - the nature of the […]

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The third podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. The 29-minute podcast covers five patterns. As with the previous podcast, there is reason for concern about the audio quality herein. Firstly, three patterns on DOM population - taking server response data and displaying it or storing it in the DOM: XML Data Island Retain […]

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I've been playing with Dojo, specifically the rich text editor, and came across a Gotcha in setting up the whole thing, which isn't documented too clearly. Specifically, Dojo needs its own window.onload - if you have your own window.onload (as you probably do if you need any initialisation), it will conflict with Dojo!!! The solution is [...]

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I recently explained how I created my first Greasemonkey script as an experiment, then converted it to a standalone Firefox plugin/extension/add-on using an automated tool. Official homepage here. The experiment continues, as I subsequently submitted it to Mozilla, and it's now been approved as an official plugin. I've been curious about the process people go through [...]

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Continuing from the previous podcast (*cough* 12 weeks ago), more programming patterns. Unfortunately, this recording (and the next one) went pear-shaped. Sorry. I do, however, recommend them to those of you who've been wondering what an Ajax talk would have sounded like in crackly 1930s recording technology, and one in which the speaker has a [...]

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Quick announcement podcast (5 minutes): Ajax Patterns podcasts - programming patterns parts 2 and 3 - to be uploaded shortly Book has been published Recent AjaxPatterns.org updates Listen Now:  Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download document.getElementById('podPressPlayerSpace_305_label_mp3Player_305_0').innerHTML='Hide Player'; document.getElementById('podPressPlayerSpace_305').title = 'mp3Player_305_0';

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My previous post outlined Domain Teleporter, a first attempt at a GM script. Continuing the experimentation (as I have a comlpetely different real example in mind), I wanted to see how easy it was to create a self-contained FF extension from the GM script ... I figure there's a significant population who have FF and [...]

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Update: As an experiment, converted this into a Firefox extension (Blog Article, Extension homepage) DomainTeleporter, my first Greasemonkey script, is related to this blog post from last April: If you shop at Amazon.co.uk, you’re often out of luck when it comes to reader comments. So I often find myself editing the URL, switching back and forth between [...]

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