Software As She’s Developed

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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Quizr - AKA “The reason this blog has been sparse for the past couple of months” - is online now. It’s a site I developed to allowing making, taking, and sharing of quizzes … making the most of Ajax and the assorted Web 2.0 technologies. At the heart of it is user-generated content - anyone […]

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Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category - http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2. Thanks […]

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This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: […]

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I can feel a case of the Wiki Twitch coming on … Victims of the Wiki Twitch have a perfectionist tendency which causes them to optimise content they come across, for the benefit of others and for reasons of “enlightened selfishness” - the motivation to improve what they will likely read again in the future. Many […]

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And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We’ve already looked at the technical details, now we’re looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features. I’m asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. […]

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