Monday, January 22nd, 2007
Ajax Driven Memory Configurator
Category: Showcase
David Chidester has put together a simple example of using Ajax to help a multistep process with the Ajax implementation of a Computer Memory Configurator over at PCMemoryStore.com.
The process for finding the right memory was tedious before hand, and has been simplified with this simple bit of Ajax.
2.8 rating from 16 votes
interesting but very slow … was json or XML so hard to implement ???
P.S. there are different errors for each interaction
It looks cool, but unfortunately it just wedges under Safari and doesn’t render correctly under Firefox. Opera? The select box for “Choose Your Manufacturer” doesn’t do anything when you click it.
David could have solved this problem with three standard select boxes and saved himself about 8 hours of development time. Not only are the AJAX selectors slower then the standard html select they are obviously not platform independent and by using them he has lost a valuable usability tool, the first letter keyboard shortcut. Instead of pushing “s” for Sony I have to click through three screens of computer manufactures.
Looking at four different online hardware stores, the logical connection is usually:
RAM manufacturer –> amount –> type –>price
or
amount –> type –> manufacturer –> price
I do not see any benefit from using ajax methods here.