Posts tagged: AJAX

First we had Shockwave, which begat Flash which begat Flex and Apollo, while meanwhile people have been busy doing Ajax.

Of course Microsoft wants to get in on the action, and Sun does too — announcing JavaFX today.

The name “JavaFX Script” is brilliant – now instead of just confusing Java and Javascript, people can confuse them with JavaFX too! Plus it sounds a little like “Flex” and has two As, a J and an X in it. Maybe Microsoft will rebrand Silverlight as “JFlex.NET” to help things along.

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis. Then, while I was mulling this over, a neato Javascript library demo I was running crashed Safari, taking my post with it.

Lesson 1: I will remember to always use “Edit in TextMate” in the future.

Lesson 2: I won’t get too excited about cramming my pages full of Javascript.

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization. However, I think the time is right to release this draft document on an important Internet standard. The document is presented inline here for convenience; however, the preferred permanent reference is: http://e-scribe.com/stfu

Recent trends in internet-based application development have
fostered the rapid spread of asynchronous, Javascript-based techniques
known by the umbrella term "Ajax" and by related terms such as "AHAH",
"POX", and so on.

This brief paper argues for a plaintext, synchronous alternative style
with some compelling advantages, one of which is (naturally) a catchy
name.

Synchronous Text/plain For User-agents -- STFU -- is a content-
delivery standard offering simple, reliable, high-performance routing
of content to Internet end-users. Implementation is orders of
magnitude faster than for typical Ajax applications, with a
corresponding drop in defect rates.

It's that simple. STFU.

  * well-tested
  * cross-platform
  * highly scalable
  * enterprise-ready
  * supports Unicode!
  * compliant with Section 508 Accessibility Requirements

One prominent adopter of STFU technology is the Internet Engineering
Task Force, which uses it for the dissemination of their most
important documents:

  ietf.org/rfc/rfc-index-latest

STFU also sidesteps technical quandaries related to markup formats,
such as those summarized here:

  hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

It's no accident that the author of the above (widely cited) document
chose to deliver his important message via STFU. 

Sometimes the debates over emerging standards and technologies become
wearisome, and pragmatic individuals find themselves wishing for a
magic phrase that might quiet the true believers and allow all
involved to move on to more productive activities. May we recommend:

STFU!

If you are already using STFU, you are welcome to display this PNG badge:

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’ve been enjoying listening to the “Audible Ajax” podcasts from Ajaxian lately. One of the older shows was a talk by Lugradio’s Stuart Langridge in which, in an aside, he mentioned a table sorting widget he had written. It sounded cool. When I got home I fired up the browser and found it: sorttable.js.

Even though it’s over two years old and doubtless there are a bazillion Ajax (tm) toolkits that include supersets of this functionality, I find it to be a very elegant thing. Largely that’s because of its utterly configuration-free operation. As long has you’ve put <th> headers on your table, you just include the script in your page, and set class="sortable" and a unique id on each of your table(s); clicking on a table header re-sorts the table by that column, without any action on the server side at all.

I wish I’d known about retest when I posted about regular expressions recently. It’s a great little utility from Christof Hoeke that uses Python’s re module and SimpleHTTPServer power to give you an interactive regex tester right in your web browser. He says he’s only tested it on Windows XP, but it worked great for me on OS X 10.4.3.

---

Brendon commented on Sun Feb 18 18:29:06 2007:

Another good Regular Expression tester to check out is ReJax:

Another Update, 2005-12-15: MS has fixed the incompatibility with Gecko-based browsers as of today.

Update: A connection at Microsoft has said that this should at least work on Firefox, and that he’s passed along my report. Hopefully fixes will be forthcoming.

Windows Live Local has potential, but it’s a total strikeout on the Mac.

(Perhaps the “Windows” part of the name should have been a clue. But if it’s really not supposed to work on the Mac, why not do some browser sniffing and send a helpful message – like “Go away”?)