Software As She’s Developed

It’s often a requirement for an Ajax app to “bust the cache”, i.e. call a service and ensure its response comes direct and not from a cache. For all the talk of fancy header techniques, the easiest way to do it is by appending an arbitrary parameter, typically a random number and/or a timestamp i.e. […]

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A pattern for your consideration, about using Ajax to help pages be RESTful. Problem How to personalize content and make pages cacheable and bookmarkable at the same time? Forces We want pages to have clean URLs that describe the main content being viewed. Doing so makes pages easily bookmarkable and send-to-friend-able, and also allows us to cache the […]

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Comet Takes to IE Like a Fish Takes to Acid Comet - or HTTP Streaming, if you will - is a little sensitive when it comes to portability, and I'll give you four guesses which major browser is causing the grief? Yeah, IE makes it difficult for two reasons: (a) IE's XMLHttpRequest component doesn't tell [...]

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A little while back, I mentioned that some people in the patterns community have been noticing the Ajax Patterns. In particular, there have been a series of discussions about the patterns by the Software Architecture Group in the University of Illinois Computer Science Dept (home of Netscape forerunner Mosaic btw). The SAG is led by [...]

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Abe Fettig's done some important experimenting to arrive at a direct remoting technique, one which bypasses the need for a Cross-Domain Proxy and doesn't rely on cross-domain On-Demand Javascript. Compared to the latter technique, Abe's idea is more functional, because you get the power, expressivity, and bidirectional capability of XMLHttpRequest, as opposed to the On-Demand [...]

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If Ajax apps are to be rich, there must be a way for the server to pass new information to the browser. For example, new stock quotes or an instant message someone else just sent you. But the browser's not a server, so the server can't initiate an HTTP connection to alert the browser. The [...]

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Ajax Basics 2 of 3 This is the second 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 - Events and Timing. Podcast 2: Web Remoting (XMLHttpRequest, IFrame, HTTP Streaming) This 75 minute podcast covers web remoting concepts and the [...]

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"A Mock Is Not So Stupid After All!" Dave Crane's been talking about Mocking the Server-Side: A Mock Object is a stand-in for the real thing. Few modern programs are really standalone, and enterprise apps require a very complex context in order to operate; containers, databases, directories, web services, etc. This can make testing difficult, [...]

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Many equate Ajax to "Is it using XMLHttpRequest?", which I think is taking the acronym too literally. There's a reason why I've learned to say "Ajax" rather than "AJAX": the term is user-centric, not techno-centric, and best defined in terms of what it gives users rather than how you deliver it. And what it gives [...]

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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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