Software As She’s Developed

It’s belatedly dawned on me how OpenSocial makes a great server-less Ajax platform. When you create an OpenSocial gadget, you’re building a lil Ajax app that performs much coolness that would normally require a server, but doesn’t. Effectively, you’re delegating the duties of the gadget’s host environment. All you have to do is write a […]

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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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I am amazed that for all the talk about future Java features, there is hardly any mention of operator overloading. Certainly syntactic sugar is high on the priority list, with the Java world starting to realise the benefits of powerful literals and closures. (Good thing too. Steve Yegge: "Java's biggest failing, I've decided, is its [...]

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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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Coding Horror mentions Applescript's well-intentioned attempt to feel like English. Quoting John Gruber The idea was, and I suppose still is, that AppleScript’s English-like facade frees you from worrying about computer-science-y jargon like classes and objects and properties and commands, and allows you to just say what you mean and have it just work. But saying what [...]

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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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Apparently, PragDave recently questioned the conventional wisdom about GOTO considered harmful (does this mean all "X considered harmful" articles will be retrospectively struck off the record?). Ivan Moore's given an example as to why the rule of "a single exit point" sucks, and I agree. Another reason for multiple exit points is guard clauses. Code units, [...]

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Favicons should ideally be easy to manipulate, as easy as manipulating the web page's UI. (Favicons are the little website icons you see in the address bar, browser tabs, etc.) For example, a chat app like Meebo could signal that your buddy's trying to contact you, a mail app like GMail could indicate You [...]

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James Strachan: Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?: So is the web application of the future going to be static HTML & JavaScript, served up by Apache with Ajax interacting with a bunch of XML based web services (maybe using SOAP, maybe just REST etc)? If so, do we really need a web [...]

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Day Barr: Chat is not quite the Hello World of Ajax, but it’s one of the simplest yet useful things I could do. I didn’t learn very much by writing an Ajax Hello World example and it’s completely pointless As many are learning, an Ajax "Hello World" is pretty easy, provided [...]

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