Nader Cserny at bandnews.org sent me a notice that he and his team have just released their site. The reason he told me is that it is using AJAX extensively, and as he said “Unlike all the hyped websites we tried to use Ajax in an intelligent and useful way.” This of course lit my appetite and the rest is history.

The site acts as an RSS aggregator for music bands. This could of course easily be refurnished for other purposes, but I think it’s quite neat idea, which might also make RSS feeds more accessible to the non-techies out there (because they won’t know it’s RSS before it’s too late!! he he)…

The website uses yet another “AJAX” / Rich-App framework called Prototype (JavaScript toolkit for class-driven development). I am not sure what to think of this framework myself, but perhaps it’s because I am too much in love with my own. The code is pretty much stripped from comments, making it hard to grasp all the cool stuff (No, manuals are not enough when trying to read sourcecode, not even a single line describing each class! truly bad code habit). Ok so I don’t think Prototype can be called an Ajax framework, since it does so much more it’s more proper to call it Rich-App framework. Personally I would have divided stuff up in more modular parts, i.e. there is a toColorPart() function in the same framework as Ajax and Event code.. This makes me itch, but ofcourse it’s just me flaming other peoples code, which I’m sure will haunt me in my dreams… Check out their own demos, and also a host of fancy UI components made by others with the use of Prototype, such as Rico. There is some really great stuff there.

Bandnews.org - Search & Read Music News.

Prototype JavaScript Framework

I started as a Web Developer in 1996, and quicky found the wonders of JavaScript, and has since been doing tons of stuff with it. When doing more complex stuff it has always been an issue of how to get the code to communicate between client and server, as well as between frames and what have you.. In the beginning we had to use hidden frames and iframes to send data back and forth, without reloading the main window. But one of the best features for doing that has only been widely used for 3-4 years in cross-browser enviroments (IE 5.0 introduced it). It’s the XMLHttpRequest API which allows the client to send and recieve XML documents thru ordinary HTTP GET & POST methods. The IO is handled asyncronously and uses events calls to inform the client of the status.

This introduction was taken from the pages of my own AJAX API, which I am releasing very soon, stay tuned!!

WarpXML 2.0 - AJAX on Steriods.

The WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force is trying to redeem the reputation of JavaScript, by encouraging developers to write ‘Unobtrusive scripts’ that complement the existing solution, and not the old school way where the JavaScripts are required to use the full features of a website. My personal opinion on this is that it’s about time JavaScript got it’s good name cleansed — It’s a great language, too often mistreated by bad coding styles, and lack of conceptual understanding of JavaScript and it’s purpose.

Excerpt: At the moment JavaScript suffers from outdated, uninformed, and inaccessible development methods which preclude it, and therefore web development in general, from attaining its full potential.

The WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force proposes to solve this problem by the adoption of unobtrusive DOM scripting, a way of thinking based on modern, standards-compliant, accessible web development best practices.

While both front end and back end developers will profit from this change of perspective, the most important benefits will accrue to our end users, whether they use the latest and greatest desktop browser, assitive programs like screen readers, or other devices.

Read the full WaSP JavaScript Manifesto here:
* WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force » JavaScript Manifesto

Brendan Eich writes about JavaScript and it’s future especially concerning JS 2.x.

Brendan writes “With DHTML and AJAX
hot (or hot again; we’ve been here before, and I don’t like either acronym), I am asked frequently these days about JavaScript, past and future. In spite of the fact that JS was misnamed (I will call it JS in the rest of this entry), standardized prematurely, then ignored and stagnated during most of its life, its primitives are strong enough that whole ecologies of toolkit and web-app code have emerged on top of it. (I don’t agree with everything Doug Crockford writes at the last two links, but most of his arrows hit their targets.)”

* Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: JavaScript 1, 2, and in between

Oh, well you can’t mention ‘em all except one, so here’s the AJAX / browser UI toolkit briefly mentioned in the previous post. I haven’t tried this or any of the other mentioned Ajax API’s because I have written my own a long time before all this Ajax talk, I won’t promise when I’ll release it, because it seems I have to evaluate the feature sets of quite a number of api’s first.. One’s api has to be superior ofcourse (Seriously I will probably go for a multi-layered architecture, attempting to base a complex Ajax core upon a low-level core, allowing for the many uses XML data has on a website)..

* Dojo Toolkit