Software As She’s Developed

Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Shindig, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets Background Widgets are small “mini websites”, typically self-contained blocks of content, on a larger web page (with Ajax Design Patterns, I referred to them by the nom du jour Portlets). They are used in a couple of ways: Embedded in a normal web page. For example, my […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, Google, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets Background A while back, I walked through a Google Gadget I made called Digg Roundup, which simply shows Digg headlines and can be customised on topic and popularity. In my quest for an uber-simple tutorial, one thing I skipped on was content type, the subject of the present muttering. […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Favicon, HTML, Javascript, Web, Web 2.0 I updated the favicon library a while ago, for a couple of projects I haven't released for various reasons. Anyway, Phil asked me about it, so I thought it's a good time to package it up and release it properly. And in the process wrote up Taking Browser [...]

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I've just updated my favicon library, which I first wrote about here. I'll explain more about the update in a separate post. For now, I want to talk about browser tabs. Browser tabs were introduced by Opera. Then Firefox adopted them a few years later, as did Safari. Then Microsoft stepped into the '90s with their [...]

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I recently learned about a team which had adopted a proprietary Windows application to do agile (Agile [TM]) project management. Eeek! Wrong at so many levels, but I'm going to focus on the web vs desktop angle. In an ideal world, there would be multiple UI platforms available for any application. e.g. do your project management [...]

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OAuth is not Open ID. They have a different purpose. I've been playing around with OAuth a bit in the past couple weeks and have a grip on what it's aiming to do and what it's not aiming to do. To start with, here's what OAuth does have in common with Open ID: They [...]

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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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'Wiki' derived its name from the Hawaiian for "quick". But acronyms sell better in the corporate world, as anyone who's ever won a business case for working with POJOs will be acutely aware, or anyone who's found AJAX 0wns Ajax. JAVA beats Java when you're selling a $2K seminar and you wouldn't be the first [...]

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I'm busy preparing a list of desirables for Web 2.0 APIs. One of them is good documentation, and I came up with this term - "Documentation As Conversation" - to articulate much of what is needed in modern software docs - documentation which belongs to the community of users/end-developers as it does to the people [...]

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A reader just mailed me about what I see as concerns with Ajax right now...what's still worryng? Well, here are a few things off the top of my head... Accessibility is still a key issue, but more to do with if people bother to Ajaxify at all than if people break accessibility. If developers are required by [...]

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