Software As She’s Developed

I've recently been playing around with PHP again, because (a) it's vastly simpler to deploy personal projects in PHP than any other platform (aside from pure client-side Ajax of course!) (b) it's so easy to get simple stuff done. Anyway, one thing I'm doing is creating a RESTful service where parameter crunching is at an all-time [...]

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Confirming that enterprise reuse can be a bit of a joke at times, Jason Gorman shares this fable on enterprise reuse (via another inspired Jason). Short summary: Two ladies could save 8 cents by boiling tea in the same kettle. But the cunning analyst forgets that, since they live 20 miles from each other, there [...]

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Will the peripheral IT community come to view REST and Rails as equivalent? It might sound ridiculous, but consider: Unix==Linux, Wiki==Wikipedia, Ajax=Web 2.0, blogging==RSS, podcast==spoken MP3. Last but not least, every knows that Ruby==Rails So it only stands to reason that the REST equivalence shall come to pass, as REST hops on for a free ride on [...]

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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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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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Whereupon a new podcast series begins ... As promised, a new series of Ajax pattern podcasts. This is the first of four podcasts on the Ajax programming patterns. In this 73 minute podcast, we look at the seven patterns of web services as they relate to Ajax clients. RPC Service Expose web services as Remote Procedural Calls [...]

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Following from the previous post, here's my notes from the second SAG workshop/discussion on the Ajax Patterns. See the earliest post for a background on this series. Feb-2-2006 Second Ajax Patterns Discussion "We should set up wizlite "sag" group for annotations" [MM For the benefit of others, the online book draft version uses Alex Kirk's Wizlite.] Wizlite - [...]

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Further to the previous post on new Ajax programming patterns, it's also worth noting there's a new bunch of corresponding online Ajax demos too. Being programming patterns, they tend to be "pure refactorings" rather than enhancements, thus the user experience is mostly the same - you have to look under the covers to see what's [...]

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I've uploaded full text for 18 new Ajax patterns, completing a first-cut draft for all Programming Patterns content, which will be one part of the book. This section bridges the gap between the very basics of Ajax - XMLHttpRequest, DOM, etc - and the high-level stuff like widgets and visual effects. For instance, how do [...]

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