Software As She’s Developed

It’s that time in a technology’s lifecycle when myths abound and someone wheels out a collection of “myths” and retorts. Here’s my contribution to that time-honoured genre. Nine myths in 37 minutes. Myth: “AJAX” Reality: Ajax Myth: Ajax is rocket science Reality: It’s an incremental progression Myth: Javascript sucks Reality: It doesn’t Myth: The URL’s always the same Reality: Unique URLs are […]

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The publicly-editable Ajax Frameworks Page got a nice kick along in the past few days, presumably due to a recent link from Ajaxian. If this list is anything to go by, the most common language is pure-Javascript, and Java is, as you might have guessed, highest on the server-side, followed by .Net and PHP. Sections for Python and Perl were opened […]

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Agile is a big theme these days. Not surprising that it should be a big part of “Web 2.0″, since Web 1.0 is often attributed as an inspiration. Paul Scrivens reminds us of 37Signals’ association with agile principles. Similarly, the agile manifesto was mentioned in a Web Essentials talk last week (I think Kelly Goto’s […]

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Full drafts are now online for the two big Web Remoting patterns: XMLHttpRequest Call and IFrame Call. There are also a couple of new demos to illustrate GETting and POSTing with both call types: XMLHttpRequest Example, IFrame Example. A few extracts follow, but first, let me ask you: Do you know of any public IFrame remoting […]

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You’ve probably noticed the buzz around Flock, a browser built on Firefox. Information’s limited, but it seems to pick up on the “social” buzzword - tagging, annotations, RSS etc. Thing is, all of these things are possible in Firefox too via extensions. But extensions haven’t really taken off, and the reason is, quite frankly, poor […]

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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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Recent Ajax apps like Kiko are sluggish according to Alexander Kirk’s “Rise of Slow Ajax Applications (via AjaxDeveloper): Pages get more voluminous because so much code has to be loaded to the browser (which makes the browser slow again) so you could just begin to use the application. This somehow reminds me of all […]

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Scott Isaacs on a new Start.com feature (quoted on Ajaxian): DHTML-based Gadgets: Start.com consumes DHTML-based components called Gadgets. These Gadgets can be created by any developer, hosted on any site, and consumed into the Start.com experience. The model is completely distributed. You can develop components derived from other components on the web. Remote portlets take […]

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Andrew Sutherland offers a few Ajax Gotchas/Tips. I’ll add some comments. Escape content with encodeURIComponent() which is superior to escape. XMLHttpRequest’s readyState tells you how far the request has progressed. MM: If you’re confused about readyState’s transition from 0 to 4, you have good reason to be. Read the recent posting and comments on David Flanagan’s blog, and […]

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I’ve noticed that I’ve recently habitualised the Yellow Fade Technique, or what the Ajax patterns refer to as One-Second Spotlight. The typical Fade example is a form field. When you change it, the field is suddenly highlighted, then gradually fades back to its original form. This tells the user that “the computer” knows something’s happened, and […]

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