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

Dreamwalkerofyore writes “The New York Times has an article on a recent affirmation that the earth’s core rotates faster than the earth proper. From the article: ‘Confirming assertions first made in 1996, a team of geophysicists are presenting data in the journal Science today showing that the earth’s inner core… spins faster than the rest of the planet. Over a period of 700 to 1,200 years, the inner core appears to make one full extra spin. That extra spin could give scientists information about how the earth generates its magnetic field.’”

Slashdot | Earth’s Core Spins Faster than Earth