Software As She’s Developed

Mahemoff’s Podcast/Blog – Web, Programming, Usability from the Author of ‘Ajax Design Patterns’ (AjaxPatterns.org)

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Entries Tagged as 'Programming'

OpenSocial: A Beautiful Platform for Server-less Web Development

June 26th, 2008 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

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 and the Unbearable Tendency for People to Adore Whitespace in their Source Code

October 22nd, 2007 · 8 Comments · SoftwareDev

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 TEXT

CSS: #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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Operator Overloading Considered Insanely Useful

August 3rd, 2007 · 1 Comment · HumansAndTech, SoftwareDev

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” – Book of the Month

September 20th, 2006 · 2 Comments · SoftwareDev

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).

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p>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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The Uncanny Valley of Programming Languages

September 4th, 2006 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

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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How ‘Bout Those Radiobuttons?

July 29th, 2006 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

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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Guard Clause Considered Helpful

April 3rd, 2006 · 1 Comment · SoftwareDev

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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Dynamic Favicons

March 16th, 2006 · 35 Comments · HumansAndTech, Links, SoftwareDev

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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Server-Centric versus Browser-Centric

November 17th, 2005 · 2 Comments · SoftwareDev

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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Chat: The “Hello World” of Ajax?

October 6th, 2005 · No Comments · HumansAndTech, Links, SoftwareDev

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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