Web Info & Tutorials

Scott Guthrie has announced the “Atlas” 1.0 Naming and Roadmap, which includes the news that Atlas 1.0 will ship around the end of this year, that it will become “fully supported” by Microsoft, and that this means some renaming:

As part of releasing “Atlas”, we have also finally locked on an official set of product names that we will begin using moving forward. What was formerly called “Atlas” will now have a few names:

1) The client-side “Atlas” javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library. This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server (read these blog posts to see how to run it on PHP and ColdFusion).

2) The server-side “Atlas” functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. As part of this change the tag prefix for the “Atlas” controls will change from to . These controls will also be built-in to ASP.NET vNext.

3) The “Atlas” Control Toolkit today is a set of free, shared source controls and components that help you get the most value from the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. Going forward, the name of the project will change to be the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Closing remarks

We are really excited about being able to get a fully supported 1.0 release out. It will be 100% cross-browser and cross-platform. It will simplify adding rich AJAX functionality to ASP.NET applications, and it will enable hugely improved UX for end users. Getting this functionality into your hands in the most flexible way possible is our number one priority and we think the plan I outline above does just that.

Things will get even better next year with Visual Studio “Orcas” where we are adding rich JavaScript intellisense, debugging and WYSIWYG designer support for the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions within Visual Studio and many other great features to take advantage of.

Ajax is growing beyond the buzzword stage and is really taking hold in the software development world, and the studies being done are only reinforcing the fact. Take this one, for example - an independant survey from BZ Research showing that the ratio is about three out of four surveyed are already using or will soon be using Ajax and Ajax-related technologies.

In this study, 18.9 percent of respondents said that their companies have already deployed production systems using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Another 12.0 percent said that they are developing their first production systems but haven’t deployed yet, and 14.2 percent are developing pilot systems. In addition, 37.7 percent are studying the technology. Only 9.5 percent said that neither they nor their company has plans to use AJAX; 7.6 percent said that they didn’t know.

The article looks at a few of the reaasons the response has been so high, including the search for a more “Windows-like interface” for their applications and its effects on the reduced needs on the backend. They do counter the positivity with a new negative comments about Ajax and a more real, less hype look at what Ajax’s place really is.

Varien has written about, and published a screencast on their ajax based one-page checkout.

We’ve touted the benefits of a one-page checkout before, but for all you visual learners we have recorded a screencast of the one page checkout process. This New York Times article from last year (Registration required) found that for TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com, “Fifty percent more customers completed the one-page checkout process than finished the multipage process.”

The Mad4Milk aggroup (the minds that brought the concern moo.fx) hit unleashed a sort new, rattling awesome Javascript accumulation discover onto the scheme - MooTools.

mootools is a rattling compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework. Its unequalled organisation makes it extremely crossbrowser, cushy to use, and a behave to modify with your possess code. It comes with a pick of more than cardinal scripts, plugins and addons, including Effects (moo.fx) Ajax (moo.ajax), Dom Navigator (moo.dom), Drag and Drop, Sortable lists, cookies Manager and some more.

There aren’t some demos of the functionality quite still (as of the fellow of this post), but you crapper download the prototypal release of thise coercive lowercase tool.

You crapper also analyse discover what Jonathan Snook has to feature most it, having already downloaded and worked with it a bit. He’s also created a ultimate tutorial on using the newborn accumulation to create a drag-and-drop example.