Web Info & Tutorials

September 14th, 2007

JSONREQUEST EXTENSION FOR FIREFOX

Collin Jackson has written a JSONRequest extension for Firefox that exposes the JSONRequest communication API to web pages you visit.

It does this by adding a new window.JSONRequest object to your world.

An example of using this beast is on the main page itself:

JAVASCRIPT:
  1.  
  2. function request(method, data) {
  3.   var timeout = document.getElementById("timeout").value;
  4.   var url = document.getElementById("url").value;
  5.   var requestNumber;
  6.   if (timeout != "") {
  7.     if (method == "get") {
  8.       requestNumber = JSONRequest.get(url, done, timeout);
  9.     } else if (method == "post") {
  10.       requestNumber = JSONRequest.post(url, data, done, timeout);
  11.     }
  12.   } else {
  13.     if (method == "get") {
  14.       requestNumber = JSONRequest.get(url, done);
  15.     } else if (method == "post") {
  16.       requestNumber = JSONRequest.post(url, data, done);
  17.     }
  18.   }
  19.   document.getElementById('results').innerHTML +=
  20.     "Sending request " + requestNumber + "...<br />";
  21. }
  22.  

JSONRequest Firefox

September 14th, 2007

THE DIGG ORACLE: DATA MINING ON THE CLIENT

Brian Shaler noticed that almost a year ago, Digg removed the "search your own
Diggs" feature, to the dismay of thousands of Digg users. To explain
why the feature had not yet returned, they cited hardware and software
solutions as being very complicated and expensive.

Brian decided to re-implement the feature himself using the Digg APIs, and we end up with The Digg Oracle:

Because the dataset is relatively small and user-specific, performing
tasks like searching/filtering and sorting can easily be done on the
client, using Google Gears. The tool downloads the selected user's
entire voting history, indexes the stories in the local DB, then does
all the sorting/searching without connecting to Digg's servers.

Here we see an original query, and the application starts to download the users usage data:

Digg Oracle Loading

When the data is loaded, searching and filtering the data is extremely fast, even if you use Kevin Rose as your sample :) This is a great non-offline example of using the database and workerpool components.

September 14th, 2007

TAKING YOUR WEB DEVELOPMENT SKILLS TO THE DESKTOP USING ADOBE INTEGRATED RUNTIME

Kevin Hoyt of Adobe gave us a personal tour of how you can take your web development skills to the desktop using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). The talk was designed for the Ajax developer, and special emphasis was given to the latest features in the AIR Beta to include:

  • File Pickers
  • Native Clipboard
  • Native Drag and Drop
  • Service Monitoring
  • Native Windows with Custom Chrome
  • Local Database

Kevin walks through these examples as he builds out sample AIR applications.

Go ahead and The Ajax Experience.

September 14th, 2007

THE BROWSER.NEXT LIST

Alex has condemned his terminal place on what he desired to wager from IE, and has absent a lowercase meta, by conversation most what he wants to wager from all of the browsers, from an Ajax accumulation authors perspective.

This is a pleasant list, and after you feature it you actualise how you would be diversion ended fields of gage if it ever happened. That is modify genuine when you countenance and wager that it isn’t an dementedly enterprising list! If the vendors meet did this, we devs would be in a aggregation meliorate state.

Happy Browser.Next

  • Event Opacity: Let me verify you how to bubble
  • Long-Lived Connections: Two tabs isn’t enough
  • Expose [DontEnum] To Library Authors: Give accumulation authors this, now
  • Fast LiveCollection -> Array Transforms: Fast .toArray module impact for now
  • Provided A Blessed Cache For Ajax Libraries: CDN for all
  • Mutation Events: Let libs undergo when a modify happens
  • onLayoutComplete: “after onDomReady, but potentially before every images hit ended loading, inform us when the layout and geometry hit stabilized.”
  • HttpOnly cookies: Help us with security
  • Bundle Gears: When the unstoppered maker ordered of APIs is primed for maturity time
  • Standardize on the Firebug API’s: Nice debugging for all!
September 14th, 2007

HOW TO BUILD A CROSS-BROWSER HISTORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

History management comes up often, and Bertrand Le Roy of Microsoft has written about his experience building a cross-browser history management system.

Betrand details his foray into dealing with browser quirks of IE, Safari, and Opera:

So things are in a pretty grim state currently. It seems like we're going back (pun intended). We used to have a collection of tricks that made possible an implementation of a history manager that worked pretty well in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Now, we only have IE, Firefox and Safari Mac. I just hope this is only temporary and that both Apple and Opera repair their browsers soon.

Cross Browser History