Record a web-browsing session using neato AJAX-powered “web recorder”

This is an application which feels like it must surely have a useful purpose. I’m not totally sure what that use would be though. Perhaps recording a demo or walk-through of a website.

From the site:

TAPEFAILURE is a “history recording tool.” What this means is that anyone can record a browsing session using TAPEFAILURE’s recorder, then save it, and share it with others. Each recorded session can be played back virtually perfectly through our playback tool; as long as you know the tape ID or have a link, you can view your recorded session over and over again.

Overall, the site is attractively designed, very simple to get started, and seems like it could be really useful. They should include a couple of example recordings with usage scenarios — the kind of thing that marketing people love to put all over the place, and probably the programmers think is totally obvious.
We did have a problem trying to record something on Ajax Blog — (got a “Precondition Failed” message from our web server).
Some issues I noticed:

• No way to Preview or Play the recording before you Save it.
• Loading Digg didn’t work correctly when recording (kept on reloading the home page)
• Sometimes it felt a little bit slow

Overall, really neat concept, nicely executed, feels like a toy until we figure out the business model.

Oh yeah, and the AJAX functionality is pretty slick — the application does what it promises smoothly, without any downloads or additional steps needed by the user. It would be neat to see what the database info looks like to do the replays.

Check it out: TAPEFAILURE

(Via Digg)
What would you use it for?

WWJUA - Where Would Jesus Use Ajax?

There’s a good discussion going on over at Ajaxian about specific times when Ajax should or should not be used based on a posting by Alex Bosworth (10 Places You Must Use Ajax).

From Alex’s article:

For heavy use applications such as a webmail client or a blogreader, users have the luxury of time to learn new UI concepts, and the frustration of interacting with a slow interface. This kind of application is a perfect opportunity to leverage Ajax everywhere. The more frequently users use an application, the more Ajax should be powering that use.

However for most web applications, it doesn’t make any sense to use Javascript for everything or even anything. Ajax only really clearly helps in a limited set of circumstances; the web already worked pretty well before Ajax and there are a lot of pitfalls and drawbacks to using Ajax in web development. A straight html weblog works just fine without being generated dynamically on the client with a stream of asynchronous messages from the server. Plain old HTML also works great for documents, or navigating between documents. Simple or rarely used applications can get along fine without putting in a bunch of Javascript.

A good reminder for sure, that ultimately it is not the technology that should dictate developer choices, rather it should be whatever will best serve the customer (the users!)

Good discussion going on Ajaxian: 6 Places You Must Use Ajax

Ajax without the X? - Good article about combining a generic Javascript new script engine with some PHP to deliver simple AJAX interactions

If you’ve wrestled with the whole XMLHttpRequest part of AJAX you should read this article. It clearly explains the technique of appending a new Javascript SCRIPT tag into the body and using the results to display new or updated content.

But there is one problem with most of the current implementations of Ajax: it has one dependency, and that is the XmlHttpRequest object. Most modern browser, like Firefox, have inbuilt support for this object, but older browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, don’t have native support for this object. Luckily, IE 6 does support it, but it’s built in as an ActiveX control, which means your visitors get an ugly warning message about the possible danger of an ActiveX control, or in some cases it just doesn’t work at all.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Ajax without even having to use the XmlHttpRequest object.

Read the article: PHPit - Totally PHP - Ajax & PHP without using the XmlHttpRequest Object

Via digg where there’s some good discussion going on about this technique.

ONJava.com: AJAX: How to Handle Bookmarks and Back Buttons

I can’t wait to try this library out to see if it really does work to enable back and forward button support. Don’t be afraid to read all 6 pages of this excellent article and then download the example code and libraries.

This article presents an open source JavaScript library that finally brings bookmarking and back button support to AJAX applications. By the end of this tutorial, developers will have a solution to an AJAX problem that not even Google Maps or Gmail possesses: robust, usable bookmarking and back and forward behavior that works exactly like the rest of the Web.

“AJAX: How to Handle Bookmarks and Back Buttons” explains the significant issues that AJAX applications currently face with bookmarks and the back button; presents the Really Simple History library, an open source framework that solves these problems; and provides several working examples.

The principal discoveries of the framework presented in this article are twofold. First, a hidden HTML form is used to allow for a large transient session cache of client-side information; this cache is robust against navigation to and away from the page. Second, a combination of hyperlink anchors and hidden iframes is used to intercept and record browser history events, tying into the back and forward buttons. Both techniques are wrapped with a simple JavaScript library to ease development.

Read article: ONJava.com: AJAX: How to Handle Bookmarks and Back Buttons

Simple and clear example of how to create a MySQL connection with PHP/AJAX

This is a good and simple example of doing one very clear action — sending a command to open a MySQL database connection through the AJAX transport layer. It includes downloadable code examples as well to get you started.

Filed under, “Roll-your-own-Ajax” department.

In this tutorial I will explain how to open a mysql database connection using PHP and the all popular AJAX. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the XMLHttpRequest object works within php and the advantages of using it.

Read the full article: Creating a MySQL connection with PHP/AJAX at John Wiseman

Build an AJAX application in php in minutes with symfony

Build an AJAX application in php in minutes with symfony

Easy Ajax in symfony

Overview

Symfony has Ajax helpers that make programming an elaborate interface a piece of cake. This tutorial will show you step-by-step how to create an Ajax-powered symfony application in minutes.

This PHP framework presents a nice screencast demonstrating how easy it is to create an ajaxified web application. This is very very similar to the Ruby on Rails demonstration application, which is really cool, to see people boil it down to a demo-able screen capture movie.

Looks interesting, will check this out. They’re using code from the scrip.aculo.us library in their online demo.

http://www.symfony-project.com/

jsquery - AJAX JavaScript ResultSet with securable JDBC server side component

This is a very FAST AJAX implementation using server generated javascript and eval() as opposed to XML.

Site includes full source code distribution with working examples.

http://www.jsquery.com/

An implementation of an AJAX JavaScript data generation server, http client, and client result set

Uses a JavaScript http client to dynamically map the results of data requests from a Java application server to a web browser HTML form without requiring refresh or page submit (similar to Google Suggest). Server side data can be SQL via JDBC, an object relational mapping using a tool such as Hibernate, returned from a server connecting a group of peers or pipelined from another source like a SOAP server.

Adding Persistent Searches to GMail via Greasemonkey (& Ajax)

This is pretty cool. Say you have an often-performed search on your GMail archive - you can store that as a Persistent Search via a Greasemonkey plugin to Firefox.
More details:

Persistent searches (a.k.a. smart folders or saved searches) seem to be the feature du jour of email clients. Thunderbird has them, Evolution has them, and Mail.app soon will. On the other hand, Gmail is the web mail app to use. While one doesn’t normally think of web apps as having such advanced power user features, it recently occurred to me that it should be possible to add persistent searches to Gmail.

WebORB Message Server Chat (with Google Maps)

If you really want to see a cool “Web 2.0″ application, look no further than this sweet visual world / global chat system built by The Midnight Coders. It pretty much freaking rocks.

From the site:

This example demonstrates bi-directional messaging between heterogeneous (Flash and AJAX) clients and WebORB Message Server. The server performs additional processing to geolocate chat users, injects necessary information in messages so users can plotted on the map.

Type your message in the text field below and press Enter or click Send to broadcast the message to the channel. To share your map with a user, select the user in the list and click the ‘Share Map’ button. The user has to accept map sharing and you will be notified when it happen. Once the map is shared, you pan, zoom and switch map types. All of these actions are immediately replicated with the other user.

WebORB Message Server Chat (with Google Maps)

AJAX: Dawn of a new developer - Good introductory article on JavaWorld.com

Dave Johnson presents an excellently written introduction to Ajax over at JavaWorld.com. Besides calling Ajax the “crown jewel in the current Web evolution that has been dubbed Web 2.0″ (a position we would not necessarily disagree with…), Johnson presents a good case (especially directed towards Java developers) for the use of Ajax. He also gets into some good patterns to use and development tips. All in all, an excellent Ajax article, especially if you’re a Java developer.

Summary
The recently coined term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript with XML) has given new life to Web development and spurred the advance of Web 2.0. This article looks at the current state of AJAX and how it is changing the Web developer’s job description. In particular, Dave Johnson identifies some of the more important AJAX technologies and tools and how these are introducing new usability and development issues for Web developers.

Read the entire article: AJAX: Dawn of a new developer

« Previous Page — Next Page »