Baby steps with Ajax

I’ve tiptoed into the Web 2.0 world by adding a couple small Ajax features to the blog.

First, there’s now a “More” link at the top of my Random Bookmarks sidebar which fetches another seven random links from the server and plugs them into the page without reloading.

Second, I added a gratuitous animated roll-unroll toggle to the comment form, and made it closed by default. OK, that’s not Ajax, that’s just fluff.

I used the moo.fx and moo.ajax libraries to achieve these wondrous results.

I can see the user interface dilemmas multiplying before my eyes. As an experiment I’ve labeled the Ajaxy controls with a black diamond (◆). Snowsport connotations intentional –fast and fun but a little more dangerous.

I can also see how this would drive one to structure web apps as loosely coupled sets of web services which can be called either by a page rendering script on the server (assembling the various components for initial load) or by an Ajax call from the client (discretely updating individual components).

Very cool. Lots to think about.

suzanne commented on Mon Feb 27 20:05:22 2006:

so lovely! i’m very much liking the gracefulness and sense of dynamic that AJAX is adding to pages. very subtle and yet effective.

miguev commented on Wed Apr 12 18:47:41 2006:

Nice feature, but it makes Firefox to put CPU at 100% for at least 3 seconds. Expensive, isn’t it?

Paul commented on Wed Apr 12 20:12:37 2006:

Hm. What Firefox version and platform? It certainly doesn’t do that for me (FF 1.5, OS X).

miguev commented on Thu Apr 13 05:40:20 2006:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; es-ES; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060324 Ubuntu/dapper Firefox/1.5.0.1

BTW, aKregator (embedded Konqueror) takes high CPU for a moment, but mush less than Firefox. I’ll use aKregator in the future :-)