Firefox

Ajax and Flash mistakes was pretty interesting. Some new idea for Kindo there, and some affirmations of stuff that I have been feeling negative about for a while. Also some affirmations of stuff we’ve done well too. Checkout slideshare.net

This session felt like a recap session on some of the technologies the client-side AJAX support. I am constantly impressed by the javascript intellisense support that is avialble inpeople are already using in their day-to-day development. You can see his own recounting of the session here. He talked about Muti-targeting, CSS support and LINQ to SQL for data access. He next walked through a pretty simple example of using a server-side UpdatePanel to reduce screen flicker.

Second, Facebook. Why is Facebook so popular? Once again, it’s simple: curiousity, jealousy, etc. People love to check up on friends, show off to friends, etc. More so than anything, the Photos application has made Facebook what it is today. Knowing where and when you’re being tagged, along with the ability to find pictures of your friends is, simply put, completely targeted at human emotions. People can’t help but use it. THAT is compelling content. And best of all, it’s user-generated, AJAX-validated (ie, it fills in names based on your existing friends list) and virtually maintenance free. It’s really the perfect idea for traffic generation.

When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple History and Handling Bookmarks and Back Button as well as Mike Stenhouse's Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for Ajax Applications. But it was a lot easier to just experiment directly on the different browsers and verify our theories directly.

JavaScript developers discarded the stigmata of the “move stuff around, require certain browser settings and pop things up” days of DHTML and embraced Dom Scripting and later on Ajax taking over the web application world by storm. By now having JavaScript as an interest on your CV does not get you a confused shake of the head but is actually sought after by headhunters.

¿Decir que la Web 2.0 está basada en AJAX? ¿Desde cuando AJAX definió la Web 2.0?. Si te gusta llamarle Web 2.0, al menos ten en cuenta que todo eso involucra al menos:

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt has defined his vision for “Web 3.0″. It is exactly what we are building at Teqlo.

I just caught this article over on Wired Blogs about Jesse James Garrett’s reaction to AIR. Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax so it makes sense that he would be happy with AIR, but he has a couple of good quotes about what it means for developers and how it extends the reach of Ajax - all things we want it to do:

前回から悩みに悩んでいる、more以下の文章をAjaxで読み込むとLightboxが働かない、の第二回目でございます。

L’interface de HiTask est très intuitive. Vous y retrouvez un calendrier, une vue de la journée en cours et ses activités, les membres de votre équipe, la fenêtre de clavardage et évidemment, l’espace vous permettant d’ajouter vos tâches. HiTask utilise les technologies auxquelles vous vous attendez d’un service Web2.0. Utilisation de l’Ajax qui permet de faire des modifications à la page sans devoir la rafraîchir. Vous pouvez aussi modifier les dates de début et fin d’une tâche, réorganiser l’ordre de vos tâches ou encore attribuer une tâche à un autre projet en un clin d’œil en glissant et déposant vos éléments sur le calendrier ou d’un projet à l’autre.

RJS wouldn’t be very useful if you couldn’t make Ajax calls from your pages. Rails offers many ways to perform Ajax calls and each is particularly suited to a particular situation. See the Ruby on Rails documentation for more information on the following methods.

Check out the latest version of Software As She's Developed where Michael Mahemoff interviews me - or am I interviewing him :) - on Ajax Diagnosis And Testing Patterns.

Now there are plenty of these types of apps available online but I fell for HiTask’s great use of ajax. This is one of those web apps which makes you feel like you’re using a desktop application.

Adobe announced the public alpha of its Apollo development framework that allows developers to build cross-platform hybrid web/desktop applications using Flash and Ajax. The tech blogosphere responded mostly positively, looking forward to the era of so-called rich Internet applications that’s been predicted for some time and to the possibility of web applications used offline.

Sun Web Developer Pack (SWDP) is a new integrated toolkit from Sun Microsystems that consists of a collection of Web 2.0 technologies that enable next generation Web application development. The toolkit consists of binaries, tutorial, documentation, samples (including source) to build your Web 2.0 applications and deploy them on industry-grade containers. It includes support for building rich user interface using Ajax technologies with Project jMaki & Project Dynamic Faces, light-weight Web services with Atom / REST APIs / WADL and server side scripting with Project Phobos.

If you work on any WordPress blogs/sites that are written in any language that has accented characters and happen to be on DreamHost, you have probably noticed character encoding problems. For instance, the new auto-save feature in WordPress or the Ajax categories add field in the category list, can display improperly encoded characters.

I created a regex to grab the words following “I love” and “I hate” through Google blogsearch in PHP. I’m combining this with my AJAX midterm and hope to create a visual representation similar to this: http://phasetwo.org/post/a-better-tag-cloud.html

On a more practical note, if someone could tell me how to combine the functionality of Kashou’s Inline Ajax Comments with Mike Smullin’s Ajax Comments 2.0, I’d be incredibly grateful. I fiddled plenty, but it’s not something I’m like to figure out on my own.

There are still a couple of seats left in the Advanced Tutorial, where we’ll be talking about Ajax and MochiKit. We’ll also be covering some of the features you can already import from the __future__ of TurboGears — SQLAlchemy, and Genshi.

Here is my list of what I consider to be the Best Free Technical Training and Tutorial submissions for the last month to the programming section of digg.com. These cover several areas, including general programming tutorials, understanding how to code better, Perl, Javascipt and PHP scripting, CSS, Python and Ruby programming, Ajax web application development, web design, and freely available technical and programming ebooks.

This is difficult to achieve in your everyday portals - even if it looks pretty. And especially when based on the totally unscaleable technology called AJAX! There are millions of users in the world, and scaling up with AJAX is like feeding a country. Microsoft Live is a classic example where this has been a perpetual scalability problem.

I see great scenarios for "WPF/E" (Code Name). Java Servlets, JSPs, ASP.NET, PHP and any other server side engine can emit XAML just by detecting the browser capability. This can offer a "rich to reach" scenario. If I am not compatible with WPF/E, I would only see a simple text data and if I happen to use a compatible browser, I see a great chart with a lot of interactivity. Add a flavor of AJAX to it and you have a great recipe for serving amazing web experiences. I am already setting up Apache Tomcat to emit XAML from a servlet. I will post my findings very soon.

With the efficiency and performance advances that we have with AVM2, we can expect to see this for the new JavaScript engine as well. So, previously demanding JavaScript applications may become more feasible (including AJAX applications).

he Rich AJAX Platform is ready to help you create AJAX-enabled Web applications using the methods and concepts of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. In fact, RAP can be thought of as RCP for the Web, and that means, among other things, that a large part of the existing code from desktop RCP applications can be used to run them in a browser.

Tonight I've been to a free talk at Skillsmatter by Dave Crane, all round Javascript guru and co-author of my favorite Ajax books: Ajax in Action.

The beta 2 release of the asp.net ajax library brings drag and drop support for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in both Safari and Firefox. DND support has been around for Firefox since the Atlas March CTP. However, it was accidentally left out of the beta 1 release of asp.net ajax. Now it's back with additional support for Safari.

while dealing with large and nested amounts of data, you might think about adding more usability to your website with a search function. with AJAX you can do it even better than with a static submission.

A new week, a new post. We’re almost finished with our research on existing applications (similar to our idea) and willingness by teachers and students in using our application. While finishing our research I’ve started learning AJAX. At this point it’s uncertain if we will be using this technology to realise our application. There’s also a possible use in Ruby on Rails and Flex.

Drop 6 of the Web Client Software Factory is now posted on the CodePlex site here. If your not familiar with the WCSF it's from the PAG group and is intended to provide guidance on building ASP.NET applications that combine workflow, AJAX and bring a flavor of the Smart Client CAB to the web.

I've been doing a lot more Atlas...err... ASP.NET AJAX lately so expect to see more on the blog about that. I still am not convinced that not keeping the Atlas tag around isn't useful. I can search for Atlas UpdatePanel and get better results then if I search "ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel". But then again I still think of workflow as WWF!

Sorry, but I must interrupt this very enjoyable 1950’s commercial for soap to remind you that there is more to life than AJAX. Man cannot live by AJAX alone, and my AJAX lies over the ocean, and…and…never mind. Sure I love AJAX, but I am so sick of everyone making such a big deal about it. To me, AJAX is a great tool to provide extra functionality and a bit of eye-candy. That’s it.

An interesting approach to reduce the response time while dealing with 3rd party data can be found here as a W AJAX pattern.

I had an idea for a a Google Maps Mashup so I set about going about it yesterday thinking it was going to be pretty straight forward. Turns out I had to learn a bit a bout Ajax which was good/bad. Anyways so I had bits of my mashup working and I couldn’t for the life work out why a piece of code wasn’t working the way it should… half a day later it clicks…. the variable wasn’t global!……. argh……………..

Blue Dot is obviously going to be a lot like del.icio.us. You put a little bookmarklet in your bookmark bar and then when you find an interesting page you click it to add the page to your links (called dots, on Blue Dot). The difference is that Blue Dot really takes advantage of the whole Web 2.0 thing and gives you a nice AJAX-ey window that floats over the current page as seen to the right. This is a theme that you’ll find throughout the Blue Dot site: good use of Web 2.0 technologies to better accommodate the users, and it really helps to distinguish them. Another cool thing is that it will automatically grab images from the site you’re linking to and use them to label the link.

Flex is another deveopment environment for the web. It provides the same advantages of AJAX, enabling the develoment of interactive, modern web applications but without all the portability problems of Javascript.

Pandora owns my heart when it comes to listening to music over the internet, but I allow myself certain infidelities from time to time. Mercora uses the power of Ajax in that effective manner that makes you wonder how pages managed to ever seem smooth before. The idea behind the site is interesting: the users are the DJs, the users are the listeners. Essentially it’s a peer-to-peer music-sharing service, but with streaming instead of torrenting, and legal listening instead of pirating. One perk over Pandora is that you can actually search out specific songs and play them on the spot. Instant gratification for your ears.

Today I upgraded the wordpress engine to 2.03 to solve some minor bugs and security issues. I also added my Flickr RSS feed to the homepage. For now registration is disabled and will be back shortly(no one registers anyway). I also upgraded the archives pages to support “live archives” which allows the archives to be explored via ajax.

The last few months have been portentuous ones. The U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could radically alter the landscape of the Internet. Microsoft has been becalmed by further delays in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, and while it is moving decisively into the realm of network-available applications and services, there is a growing sense that the company is vulnerable. Meanwhile, Google has begun to assemble and make available the pieces of what is expected to become Google Office, mainly by acquiring and then refining AJAX-based products such as Writely. it is already clear that users who don’t require the complexity of an office productivity suite like Office — and that would be most of us — are going to benefit substantially from the eventual emergence of Google Office as well as other AJAX and Java-based productivity applications (because choice is presumably a good thing, and because the use of other competitor products and services will galvanize Microsoft and its developers), but the catalyst for change on a larger scale may be GDrive, the long-rumored Google service that will provide unlimited network storage to registered users and test the notion that the locus of personal computing is gravitating decidedly toward network-based services.

Truthfully, Google is a little late to the online-office apps arena. It's starting to get a little crowded (Backpack, Writely, AjaxWrite, and Zoho to name a few, beat them to the punch). True, they make the platform irrelevant, but application development is way out in front of bandwidth development right now. Bandwidth and net accessibility need to do some catching up. Demand should follow.

While Microsoft are trying to catch up with Google with their pathetic attempt at an AJAX webmail system Windows Live Mail (still in beta), Google have powered on with their newest product - Google Spreadsheets. You need to signup and get an invite to try it out since it’s still in beta but the ability for multiple people to update a spreadsheet at the same time and chat with each other while doing so is a nifty feature.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole LAMP thing, but the computer scientist in me can’t help railing against a language that proclaims its “type freedom”. Give me something with a proper type structure any day and I’ll feel much more comfortable. First idea is to see if I can get my transputer running online, initially in a kind of ‘batch processing’ mode, but possibly slightly more interactively at some point in the future. Can anyone else sense some AJAX coming on?

During the 2nd Blogging Summit, i.PH officially announced the upcoming re-launch of their blogging service. I didn’t get to see the presentation and asked some questions although one of their executives briefed me on the new ajaxy features later that day.

Google have released the Google Web Toolkit — “Build AJAX apps in the Java language”. At first I thought this might just be their version of the Yahoo UI Library, but it turns out to be a completely different approach to the same problem. The YUI Library (and most other Ajax libraries) allow you to build a Web UI directly, using HTML and JavaScript. With GWT, you write a GUI application in Java, and GWT translates it into JavaScript and HTML for web deployment. It’s a less flexible approach, but could make it easier for Java developers to develop web applications with desktop-style GUIs — if this is what they really want.

This is a compelling platform, if it works, and it’s now going open source in hope of garnering a greater number of developers contributing and using. The same folks built a DotNetNuke ("DNN") administration console based upon this.

Slide deck from the INDC - Building Web2.0 Applications with WCF and Atlas/AJAX

So Yahoo Mail has a new Ajax interface, but it’s still in beta testing and (I believe) is not available for everybody yet. My colleague at the office shared how to try it out in your current Yahoo account, though. Just log in to your email, click Options, edit your account information, then change your content preferences to English-UK instead of English-USA. Log out and then log in, you’ll find an email in your inbox inviting you to try out the beta service.

While most of you were no doubt enjoying your first long weekend of the year, I was attending the first ever Ruby on Rails conference – Canada on Rails – in Vancouver.

The latest buzz is around a technology known as "AJAX" - meaning Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ok, so you are probably still none the wiser! Let me explain.

Yahoo! Maps has released a new version now with global coverage, aerial maps, and hybrid views. Along with these features being added to the beta version of the mapping product, you can now access them through the Flash, Flex and AJAX Map components available through the Yahoo! Developer Network.

For people who don’t know about AJAX, Wikipedia gives good info. Ajax in one line is a technology by which you can send and receive data without the page being reloaded, so it looks more ‘dynamic’. I guess this could be the dummy way of explaining it.

So, after working a bit on AJAX, I found myself pulling my hair out in frustration. The reason? The “Get another” function for the random quotes block (look below) just doesn’t seem to want to work in Internet Explorer (but it does now). What’s more frustrating is that it work in every other browser. Turns out that the problem is caused by the way that IE handles AJAX. This led me to discovering two issues with my AJAX guide. First problem, which caused most of my problems, is caused by the stupid way that IE decides to handle AJAX. And the second, is due to my oversight. The changes have been made to the post. The problems are:

Many wordpress plugins… especially the ones that use Ajax also use prototype.js.

And it's an iframe so it can be embed anywhere! Maybe even in Yahoo360 and of course MySpace!

ROOT is fascinating. ROOT is creating a vault and a market for your attention metadata. Get some context from CEO Seth Goldstein’s talk at ETech. The interface looks like Ajax-y Bloomberg, which shouldn’t be surprising. Goldstein’s blog tagline says it all: “Somewhere between Wall Street and Madison Avenue lies the future of both.” ROOT is Madison Avenue meets Wall Street via Silicon Valley. There are plans to capture attention metadata from websites to videos to music to, well, just about anything that can leave behind metadata breadcrumbs. That data is yours to be stored in /Vault and can be “sold” via /Market. That’s when it all gets fuzzy to me.

It can open links in a near window size in-page, so you can open any web application inside, like your ajax homepage.(why would one do that?)

There’s been a lot of buzz about Ajax lately, but not a lot of good introductory learning resources. That’s why I created the “Ajax Toybox“. (Hereinafter referred to as “The Toybox”.)

If you’re interested in AJAX development with PHP, head over to Joe’s blog, where he has documented some stuff about the development process and RedLettr. Great stuff.

A whole bunch of AJAX mistakes to keep in mind when playing with the mcguffin that drives web 2.0

This is freakin cool: “Goowy is turning into a lot more than just another ajax/flash home page - its a full on desktop platform that is shaping up to be the best competitor to Microsoft’s Live.com…Goowy is now preparing to roll out additional functionality, including integrated instant messaging (look out Meebo) and online storage (via a partnership with box.net, using box’s new API). If you are a Goowy user, look for these features to be included with your account over the next couple of weeks.” Via [TechCrunch]

I’m constantly on the look for a new start page setup, since I’m not convinced that I’ve found the best solution yet, and live.com is really cool looking. I especially like that you can make different pages (like with My Yahoo!) and use them like tabs. Hooray ajax.

Beh, un'occhiata a Ruby on Rails..(Rubini su Rotaie..teribbile!) ve la consiglio... cioè a me lo ha consigliato un giovane sviluppatore Svizzero Raven (raven.ch stanno avanti lassù) e visti i progetti realizzati da questo ragazzo un pò di credito glielo darei :-)

The Hotmail classic feature is mainly an update to the non-AJAX version of WLM for browsers other than IE (although, you can use the non-AJAX version in IE now too). I don’t see why they can’t just create an AJAX version compatible with the other browsers though, I mean, Gmail has shown that Firefox and the like can handle AJAX perfectly well, at most they’d lose their right-click menu. Probably even better than IE. Oh well, here’s a screenshot:

On accessing the website and logging in, the site launches an Instant Messenger window that provides access to the following gateways - Yahoo, Hotmail, ICQ and AIM. The interface is good with the ability to categorize users and IM functionality is also fast. You would see another excellent use of AJAX in this application. I think AJAX is to Web 2.0 what Javascript/Flash was to Web 1.0.

In his famous pragmatic style, Rasmus Lerdorf has shared an article on his Toys blog that will walk you through what he calls a "no-framework PHP MVC framework." The task is a simple rich Web application, with SQLite and PDO for data abstraction, Ajax and JSON for data validation (input sanitation is achieved through the PECL filter package), and several components from the Yahoo! User Interface Library. All tied together with PHP, JavaScript and HTML, just like you'd expect.

The solution was to implement the integration using AJAX techiques. A handler was developed in PHP. This handler receives methods from the Javascript calls, determines the appropriate course of action based on the methods, gets the XML from the appropriate contribution, uses XSLT to translate the XML into HTML, and finally returns the target location and the HTML to the calling page.

I posted a couple of days ago about my problems debugging HTML source code when working with AJAX and also how I planned to solved it with Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. It worked, it allowed me to inspect the actual DOM and see how it changed my original source... but it was too slow to debug it that way.

Today, I found an even cooler one called Wufoo (not Hufu) over on a sweet Chinese blog that previously linked to me. Wufoo uses a heavy union of Ajax and Flash techniques. It may be a little heavier on the Flash than I would have gone, but it is still really cool.

La Web 2.0 es la palabra de moda. Se ha repetido ya muchas veces que no significa nada en concreto; se utiliza para agrupar una serie de novedades tecnológicas que se han producido en Internet y que tienen escaso valor si no se combinan entre sí. Blogs, redes sociales, wikis, RSS, Ajax, tags, Google Maps y otras palabrotas están dando un nuevo significa a la Web, la 2.0.

Now by the time I read this message, Google has temporarily stopped leting more users to signup on Google Pages, so will have to try it out later. But looking at their "about page" gives us some indication. It says that the editor is AJAX based. When you sign up your Google page would be http://yourgmailaddress.googlepages.com .You will be given 100 MB of space to store your contents on Google servers and although there is no mention of bandwidth I am sure it will be enough to serve the cause if used wisely (ya, see it as a problem if you are going to run it as a software and video sharing tool).

Google hat heute einen neuen Dienst gestartet und zeigt mit dem Page Creator, dass mit AJAX einiges möglich ist. Mit dem Page Creator bietet Google einen Dienst an, der es jedem Anfänger ermöglicht, einfach eine Homepage zu erstellen - 100 MB freier Webspace runden das kostenlose Angebot ab. Zwar kann der Page Creator nicht mit einem vollwertigem Editor wie NVU mithalten, muss aber auch nicht gesondert installiert werden - der Anwender benötigt einfach nur seinen Browser.

Una gran herramienta es WuFoo, con la cual crear un formulario es cosa de niños. Y nunca mejor dicho ya que usa la ajax (¿como no? ) para darle dinamismo y una apariencia digna de cualquier aplicación de escritorio.

AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is one of the latest buzz-words in Internet programming.

Me ha encantado esta aplicación con la cual puedes generar tus propias galerías de fotos de forma facil y rápida. El uso de Ajax hace que el rendimiento de la aplicación sea máximo y que la carga de imagenes sea la única carga de la aplicación. Además el diseño cuidado y minimalista me encanta, a ver si me monto uno para poner fotos.