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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… That’s the question I finally got to ask the man who gave Ajax its name, following Jesse James Garrett’s keynote last week at The Ajax Experience. I consider Ajax a very standard, uncontroversial, example of a pattern, so I’ve wondered why it wasn’t introduced as such, in the original Ajax paper. Jesse said he’s […]

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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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Working (offline) on Richer Plugin, I’ve expanded the list of reasons you’d want to use a Richer Plugin, i.e. Flash, Java Applets, Standalone clients, Firefox extensions etc. Here’s the list of things Ajax can’t do on it’s own - what else is there? Browser morphing Adding buttons, toolbars, bookmarks, icons; changing browser behaviour. Local file access Reading and […]

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Cool! The Best Practices/Processes Patterns are now complete. They are the final eight Ajax Patterns for now - “final” in the sense of “the list is not yet finalised”. The patterns had been sitting there unattended for about four months now. More details on the new patterns later, but here’s a quick summary … First, there’s a […]

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The Basics of Ajax: A 3-Part Podcast Series I’m beginning to podcast about specific Ajax patterns. To start with, a three-part series on the basics of Ajax development, covering all the Foundational Technologies patterns: Podcast 1: Display Patterns and the DOM. Podcast 2: Web Remoting - XMLHttpRequest, IFrame Call, HTTP Streaming. Podcast 3: Dynamic Behaviour - Events and Timing. These […]

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I just updated the ajaxpatterns.org “What’s Ajax” page to include more info on Ajax Benefits, and added a new section on Downsides. Have I missed any? Benefits of Ajax Web as a Platform: The web is no longer just about websites that expose some information; it’s increasingly being used for full-blown applications. These applications demand richer […]

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Google Base: It goes beyond classifieds. The popular view today seems to be that Google Base is all about classifieds, but as mentioned earlier, it’s much more than that. (Incidentally, still smarting I missed the “All Your Bases” happy fun humorous moment opportunity.) If Google Base lets you tag entries, you could easily create a podcast […]

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Check out Alexander Kirk’s new website: Blummy. A blummy is a kind of bookmarklet that opens up a kind of pop-up portal, giving you access to various web services. Just like a portal is made up of Portlets, a Blummy is made of Blummlets, which essentially do the kind of things bookmarklets do. e.g. […]

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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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