Web Info & Tutorials

It’s time to plan ahead. Today we’re announcing and opening the Call for Papers for the next Ajax Experience event–in September 2008.

For the past two years, we’ve put on two Ajax Experience events, the so-called West and East shows. For 2008, we think it’s time to consolidate them into one. After doing quite a bit of research with past attendees (and no small amount of internal debating) we’ve decided to hold our single event for 2008 in… Boston!

We’ve been extraordinarily pleased with the quality of the submissions of all of our past shows, so all we can say is, keep it up! The show will take place at Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston, MA from September 29 - October 1, 2008. The Call for Papers closes on January 31, 2008. Approved speakers get a free pass to show and a stipend towards airfare and hotel. See our Call for Papers page for more details on how to submit a talk.

See you there!

Boasting over 900 controls from many of the popular JavaScript libraries, AjaxRain.com has become one of the main resources for finding JavaScript and Ajax components. Owner Archana Patchirajan just sent me an email to let me know that AjaxRain has had a major facelift including:

• A new UI
• A revamped home page with the latest scripts
• A section for popular scripts
• Feeds from delicious, digg and ajaxian.

AjaxRain has truly become an invaluable resource which is used daily to find unique and powerful controls. While other sites have tried the UI aggregation route, few have been as consistently updated as this site.

Accessibility is something most developers study an reversal but not Chris Heilmann, scheme creator at Yahoo!. As a member of the Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholders assemble he takes issues concerning availableness rattling earnestly and makes it a crowning kindness in everything he builds.

Chris Heilmann fresh described his framework for making Google Charts more reachable for those who cannot wager pie charts. His framework allows for accepted reachable accumulation tables to be regenerate to charts thusly ensuring that visitors using concealment readers crapper avow plus of the accumulation patch allowing users of tralatitious browsers to analyse the actualised charts:

Using this playscript you crapper avow a simple, legal and reachable accumulation table…and it gets automatically regenerate to a pie chart.

Simply add the playscript to the modify of the embody and it’ll modify every tables with a collection titled “tochart”. You crapper delimitate the filler (widthxheight) and the colouration as a hexadecimal triplet as shown in this example. If you yield filler and colouration out, the playscript module ingest presets you crapper edit as variables in the playscript itself.

To avow his code, Chris enlisted the support of a blindfold friend, also a member of the Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholders group, who proven it with JAWS.

The playscript has also been enhanced to earmark the creation of reachable accumulation tables when actuation charts via the APIs wordy mode.

As always, it’s prizewinning to see it in action in visit to genuinely revalue it. I advert Chris and the Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholders assemble for their efforts in making the scheme more reachable to all.

I was at the PCWorld innovative product awards at CES last night, and ran into Tastebook, a site that allows you to build a personal cookbook from both online and your grandma's recipes.

The site is Rails based, and uses a mixture of JavaScript and Flash to get rich functionality such as a visual representation of the book, a designers, access to Web services, and drag and drop support.

The primaries and caucuses are here, and people want their information. CNN has an Election Center to give you that information, and it has an Ajax flavour this year:

Note the duplicate adspaces.js :)

There were features I was hoping to see that I didn't. When the results were coming in it would be nice of them to (maybe using Comet) update the page when new content came in, and updating the time (1 minute ago doesn't make as much sense if it doesn't change).

The use of Ajax itself is subtle throughout. There are lots of in place loading, lightboxes, subtle animations as you go through tabs, and more.

WebCream has been renamed and a newborn edition launched as AjaxSwing 2.0, a support that “does every computer act via anachronic JavaScript and uses coloured tender updates to emit changes in the browser.”

New Features

• AJAX functionality for factor performance and anachronic act with the server
• Asynchronous accede of client-side events and operations
• Partial tender updates exclusive to denaturized components
• Dramatic pace improvements in performance and letter processing
• Row surround menus in JTable (see TableSupport)
• Custom convexity icons and surround menus in JTree (see TreeSupport)
• Improved scripts on UNIX platforms
• Allow surround variables and directories of JARS in agent.classPath
• Drop shadows are additional to windows

Fancy composition your apps in Swing? If so, check discover the demos, and download away.