Friday, December 16th, 2005
Category: Showcase
From the vertical Ajax department comes Teacher! (via Digg), an Ajax grading app. It’s a clean, simple, app with plenty of well-considered Ajax features. Note, though, the server seems to be running a bit sluggish right now. Ajax should be a big thing for education – any other apps out there? Seriously. You’ve got kids Read the rest…
Thursday, December 15th, 2005
Category: Programming, Remoting
, Security
Simon Willison, now at Yahoo!, reports that Yahoo! has JSONified itsAPI: As of today, JSON is supported as an alternative output format for nearly all of Yahoo!’s Web Service APIs. This is a Really Big Deal, because it makes Yahoo!’s APIs available to JavaScript running anywhere on the web without any of the normal problems Read the rest…
Category: Dojo, JavaScript
, Toolkit
Dojo 0.2 has just been released! Go download it now, check out bugs closed for 0.2, or see the full list of packages. Check out the full release notes for everything that is new, here are some highlights: dual-licensed as AFL and BSD (now GPL compatible) JSON support local storage via dojo.storage many new widgets Read the rest…
Category: Accessibility, Ajax
, Editorial
, Usability
Fellow Ajaxian Michael Mahemoff posted on something not discussed enough – what Ajax can’t do: Browser morphing Adding buttons, toolbars, bookmarks, icons; changing browser behaviour. Local file access Reading and writing files on the user’s hard drive. Sound Playing music and sound effects. Rich graphics Providing rich graphics, changing dynamically. (This is gradually changing with Read the rest…
Pete Freitag has posted the outline and an example from an Ajax presentation he gave at a Cold Fusion users group. The example is the standard zip code lookup with Cold Fusion on the server and Prototype for the client side. Prototype makes the error handling and form handling easy, as you can see from Read the rest…
Ruby on Rails had a 1.0 release this week. Along with this, the Ajax side of Script.aculo.us and Prototype have final releases of their own. Download Prototype 1.4 Download Script.aculo.us 1.5 Get it while its hot.
Romain Guy is a top guy at Sun, known for his awesome effects and look and feels in Java Swing. He had a look on the Ajax side recently though, when he took Canvas for a ride. Take that rich UI frameworks! :) Source Code function drawCD() { var g2 = document.getElementById(“cdCover”).getContext(“2d”); g2.save(); g2.translate(0, cdCase.height Read the rest…
Category: Editorial
Francois Orsini gave a demonstration at ApacheCon that showed off local storage via the Derby DB. We keep getting more and more options for storage. What I demo’ed at Apache during Tim Bray’s keynotes was one particular use case of embedded Apache Derby (100% pure Java RDBMS) running within a web browser such as Mozilla Read the rest…
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
Category: Articles, JavaScript
, Programming
, Prototype
Alex Vollmer has posted a nifty article on using closures for object oriented ajax, using Prototype’s Ajax.Request object as the example. Many developers coming from the more static Java/C++/C# worlds have problems wrapping their head around closures when they first start doing ajax work with callbacks for XHR. Alex’s writes: …a closure allows JavaScript to Read the rest…
Category: Showcase
Tagworld takes social tagging to the extreme, and has Ajax effects all over the place. A very nice kayak.com-esque style search lets you narrow down results with simple sliders and the like. A clean rich editor allows you to add markup without the markup.
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
Category: Examples
We’ve been posting a lot of Ajax Desktop/Homepage/Portal websites lately, so it’s nice to see some perpectives from this new publish.com article by Stephen Bryant: Year in Review: AJAX Desktops and Homepages. I’ve emphasised a few interesting points here. The article begins with the heavyweights: start.com (and live.com): (C)ore features, which are standard among most Read the rest…
Category: Portal
Techcrunch recently posted on the flood of ajax desktops, highlighting the recent Eskobo. Eskobo looks very similiar to a lot of the ajax portal apps you’ve probably seen, with the drag and drop funtionality and ability to add your own feeds. A more interesting player in this crowded space is Porcupine Web Application Server, from Read the rest…
Category: Chat
TechCrunch has brought up Meebo’s Impressive Growth. Meebo is the top Ajax client, and is a fantastic example of what you can do with Ajax. It looks nice, acts responsive, etc. There is a reason that it gets mentioned in all of the lists of quality Ajax applications. I think an interesting debate could be Read the rest…
Category: Showcase
After we posted about the new TXN desktop, Mikael Bergkvist pointed us to another Ajax Rich Desktop called XIN. This desktop has more widgets and features, and it includes some documentation for you to write you own widgets and such.
Tom Trenka has been hacking away on dojo.crypto.*. Dojo now has implementations of MD5, and Blowfish. The implementations are designed to be self-standing and singleton objects, making them easy to use and implement. Coming soon we will see: Rijindael/AES SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 Twofish DES/TripleDES, RSA, and Serpent Code Example dojo.require(“dojo.crypto.MD5”); var message = Read the rest…
Monday, December 12th, 2005
Category: Editorial, Flash
, Showcase
At thursday’s ajax event, one of the sites recommended for demo was Etsy.com. It bills itself as “the place to buy and sell all things handmade”. It has some of the most innovative ajax techniques I’ve seen on an ecommerce site. Make sure and check out the time machine (my favorite), color picker, and the Read the rest…
In Episode 25, we chat about IE 8, standards, Acid3, server side JavaScript, and more.
