Software As She’s Developed

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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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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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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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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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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Ajax Basics 3 of 3 This is the final of three podcasts on the basic Ajax patterns. Podcast 1: Display Patterns and the DOM. Podcast 2: Web Remoting - XMLHttpRequest, IFrame Call, HTTP Streaming. Podcast 3: Dynamic Behaviour - User Actions (Events), Timing, Ajax App, Web Service, On-Demand Javascript, Richer Plugin Podcast 3: User Actions (Events), Timing, Ajax App, [...]

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Harry Fuecks suggests there are two types of Ajax apps: HTML++ and Client/SOA. This is something I've noticed too, and it cuts right across the Ajax architecture, impacting on the user-interface, the physical architecture (browser-server separation) and the abilities of the developers involved. The "Ajax App" pattern addresses this as a decision. It's the root pattern [...]

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Carlos Viellas has been watching contractors waste time (emphasis mine): As I see it, there are two positive incentives: peer pressure in justifying rates, and collecting good contacts and references. In the situations we have been witnessing, those pale next to doing whatever is possible to extend the contract, which more often than not are some [...]

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... a blog entry in which I define the term "proving". I'm defining it here because I needed to link to a definition and couldn't find a suitable URL to point to. A few years ago, we were in a meeting when an architect explained to the project manager "we'll be spending the first few weeks [...]

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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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