Late Breaking News! This isn’t the only Ajax blog.

This may come as a bit of a shock to some of you, but there have been uncomfirmed reports that other people are in fact blogging about this stuff.

I ran across ajaxian.com while I was hunting for an example I had seen earlier. It looks like its been up slightly shorter than this site, but same ballpark (theres an entry here from Shanti in February (their archives only date to march), but it wasn’t precisely a content-rich month). Though the tagline states that its Ben and Dion’s Ajax Mission (or Dion and Ben’s, depending where the image swap function is…) it looks like its been mostly Dion’s posting thus far. But even as a mostly single writer, he did have some things I hadn’t yet seen, such as Rails 0.11.1 and Tapestry*

But in short, more people writing new and interesting articles in the subject area is always good, so Welcome, or Mazel Tov, or whatever I’m supposed to say.

*I let other people do the commentary on these projects for two reasons. 1) I’m still working on learning PHP and javascript, and now munging the two together, so learning ruby might be a while for me, and 2) I hate java. Alright, hate may be a strong word, but at work, we have a bunch of static sites that are saved as .jsp and served through tomcat (and more precisely 4 instances of tomcat, with their four sets of identical files, which makes uploading content an unnecessary pain), and that, among other things, hasn’t placed learning and appreciating java really high on my things to do list.

Variable Scope, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Globals.

I put this up in one of the sajax forums a bit earlier, but thought I’d post it here as well. When I was first working/learning/playing around with sajax (after my failed attempt at writing the ajax by hand (i’ll try again later)) I tried including the sajax in a page that was included in the main body from within a function, but couldn’t get it to work.

I looked and looked, and as far as I could tell, everything was setup correctly, and so on.

Going back and looking at it tonight, I had a bit of an epiphany. Saying ‘Global’ in the comment, doesn’t actually make the variables global. Shocking. I know.

In short I somehow mentally mushed the following block into a global declaration for these variables.

/*
* GLOBALS AND DEFAULTS
*
*/
$sajax_debug_mode = 0;
$sajax_export_list = array();
$sajax_request_type = "GET";
$sajax_remote_uri = "";


The trivial solution is of course to put said global declaration after the initial comment block, and then your off to the races.

Wordpress Ajax - inline editing plugin!

Downloading this plugin right now to test. Really, really cool.

twilightuniverse.com » Blog Archive » WordPress: Touched

Current features include:

* Degradable AJAX scripting - will function as a regular edit link if JavaScript is turned off or disabled.
* Allows you to not only edit the content and title, but also the Excerpt.
* Allows you to easily turn comments and pings on or off.

Ajaxing the Rails (Loud Thinking) - Ruby on Rails adds native Ajax

Looks like Ruby on Rails is adding another trick up its sleeve: native Ajax integration. Bing Bing Bing!

Ajaxing the Rails

Rails 0.11.0 is out on the street and I’m especially proud of the Ajax support we’ve been able to include. Instead of trying to soften the blow of doing client-side Javascript libraries as many others are doing, we’ve gone ahead and more or less removed the need for hand-written client-side javascript entirely.

This is done by off-loading the creation of DOM elements to the server side, which returns complete constructs that are then injected live through innerHTML. While this method is slightly more verbose than just peddling data across the wire, it’s immensely easier to develop.

Read the rest of the article, it’s really cool:
Ajaxing the Rails (Loud Thinking)

SAJAX is now at version 0.10!

Looks like there is a new version of SAJAX out, now at version 0.10! Pretty exciting how fast they’re developing this useful library and extending it to almost evey language you could possibly want.

SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP

Breaking news: Version 0.10 is out, featuring ASP/ColdFusion/Io/Lua/Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby backends and some changes to the PHP interface (POST support and the ability to send requests to a different URL).

dojo.io.bind(): baking usability into XMLHTTP

Saw this link to Dojo over on a neat page talking about using Ajax with Wordpress to do inline editing of entries.

dojo.io.bind(): baking usability into XMLHTTP

The Dojo project is working to build a modern, capable, “webish”, and easy to use DHTML toolkit. Part of that effort includes smoothing out many of the sharp edges of the DHTML programming and user experience. On the back of such high-profile success stories such as Oddpost, Google Maps, and Google Suggest, the XMLHTTP object has been getting a lot of attention of late. Sadly, in spite of all the coverage, developers have been on their own when it comes down to solving the usability problems that come along for the ride.

John Reynolds’s Blog: AJaX: Two steps forward… Two steps back?

John makes some good points about Ajax. Sajax may provide the solution he’s looking for regarding automated generation of the Javascript, although missing from their currently supported group of languages is Java, which is most likely what he cares about.

…
The promise of AJaX is exciting, but until tools and frameworks automate the generating of “AJaX” we’re back to some pretty ugly and potentially buggy UI code.
…

Read his entire post here: John Reynolds’s Blog: AJaX: Two steps forward… Two steps back?

SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP

This is a promising up-and-coming Ajax library with backend support for the following languages: Io, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. So if you’ve been waiting for an easy way to do ajax, this is your chance. It even writes the Javascript for you. How much easier can they make it? Geez.

SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP

Welcome to Sajax!

Breaking news: Version 0.9 is out, featuring Io/Lua/Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby backends and some changes to the PHP interface.

Sajax is an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.

Usable Ajax in Practice

Baekdal.com has a good article on Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice:

One of the great benefits of XMLHttpRequest is that you can use it to make complex WYSIWYG. This has previously been hard to do on the web. Take a “build your car” feature that you often find on sites of car manufacturers. This could be greatly enhanced by the use of XMLHttpRequest. When the buyer selects something, you can connect to the database, recalculate prices, change the image or change other options - without reloading the page, on the fly.

Full article here.