Too Many Ajax Calendars

Too Many Ajax Calendars: "On his blog, Joel Spolsky, has posted some of his opinions on the proliferation of Ajax-enabled calendering systems that have been coming out lately - and how none of them seem to be up to the mark. For all the Ajax calendars that are appearing, it's a shame I can't find one which really meets my needs. I tried out Trumba, Kiko, 30 Boxes, Yahoo! Calendar, and Spongecell. I couldn't recommend any of them. My needs are probably weird, but not that weird. Further on in the post he mentions the simple needs he's looking for but hasn't found yet - things like: 'enter flights', 'understand timezones', and 'print out something reasonable'. He also touches on the 'ship early and often' mantra that so many largely anticipated sites seem to be following, without talking the time to fully develop a product that everyone won't think is 'lame' when they look and see it unfinished. He wraps it up with his theory as to why there are so many of these Ajax calendars popping up lately. According to him, it boils down to the creation of hype to try to garner corporate interest to, hopefully, get snatched up as the 'Next Big Thing'. "

Web Trends 2006 for Web Developers

Web Trends 2006 for Web Developers: "2006 is just around the corner, and that means that it is time to bring some (vague) predictions for this web business we are in. The AJAX hype will go on - but eventually fail The rather sickening hype of AJAX is going to continue, and it will get very big in the first 6-8 months of 2006. But, as the end of 2006 nears AJAX, is going to fail. The reason is not because of AJAX itself - AJAX (or AHAX) is great tool. But, you do not base your decisions on a specific tool. You base your decisions on solving people's problems and goals. If AJAX turns out to be useful in a certain scenario - use it. Remember that we have been able to do what AJAX does for a long time - with frames. Frames were also at some point surrounded with hype, how many of us have created sites where only a small part of it changed. But, in the end we realized that this cool thing really got in the way of more important stuff. This does not mean that AJAX will go away - rather the inverse. It will be a reduced to what it really is - a tool, and effectively hidden from both the developers and the end-user. Web 2.0 is going to be the next 'dot.com' wave The Web 2.0 driven community is going to start our next big dot.com wave. Although it will not be as big as the first one and the money involved will be "

AJAX and Multibyte Character Support

AJAX and Multibyte Character Support: "Taylan Pince has a post on his blog that looks at an issue several don’t think about when developing pages/applications with Ajax - multibyte caharacter support. I love AJAX, and I realize that there are more than enough tutorials on the subject floating around the web these days (my favourite is still the one over at the Apple Developer Connection). But when I wanted to use a simple AJAX menu for a site I was developing in Turkish, I quickly realized that there are some issues about character encoding in dynamically loaded AJAX elements, and that there are no apparent solutions. He creates a solution in a few simple lines of code to make the script the Ajax connection calls use a properly formatted UTF-8 content type. The code is there to take advantage of, as well as a simple function-based usage method he suggests. "

IBM Leads “Open AJAX” Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors

IBM Leads “Open AJAX” Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors: "According to this new article on the Ajax Developer’s Journal today, IBM is spearheading a new effort to promote Ajax to developers all around the world - the “Open Ajax” Coalition. The Open AJAX initiative does not have a centralized structure or website, but is rather an idea that is being formally backed by BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. A spokesperson for one of the major backers said that Google will also be backing this initiative. The coalition members say they “intend to promote Ajax’s promise of universal compatibility with any computer device, application, desktop or operating system, and easy incorporation into new and existing software programs.” The article continues on, noting capabilities of Ajax, as well as the fact that this coalition is not just “lip service”. Commitments have already been started by several of the main participants (such as IBM already contributing to the Eclipse project). There are various other quotes from notables in the community as well, including Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Scott Dietzen (Zimbra), and Steve Benfield (Agentis Software). "

Ajax Flashcards

Ajax Flashcards: "Darrell Brogdon has created a new flashcard website. PHPFlashcards presents questions on PHP, Ajax-style . I don’t know about you, but tedious page refreshes is one thing that keeps me away from many flashcard/quiz sites. The solution here eliminates those - you click an option and a “Correct”/”Incorrect” status appears and fades away, and your overall score is updated. "

Ajax Flashcards

Ajax Flashcards: "Darrell Brogdon has created a new flashcard website. PHPFlashcards presents questions on PHP, Ajax-style . I don’t know about you, but tedious page refreshes is one thing that keeps me away from many flashcard/quiz sites. The solution here eliminates those - you click an option and a “Correct”/”Incorrect” status appears and fades away, and your overall score is updated. "

IBM in the News: AJAX, DB2, LAMP

IBM in the News: AJAX, DB2, LAMP: "IBM in the News: AJAX, DB2, LAMP February 3rd, 2006 There have been some very exciting developments from IBM over the last few weeks. Here are four..."

An Ajax Login System (with Help from PHP)

An Ajax Login System (with Help from PHP): "Evolt.org has posted this tutorial on the creation of a login system by combining the powers of PHP and Ajax. The idea is to keep the user on the same page until they are fully authenticated. As it stands now, most pages have to resubmit the data to a handler where it might be rejected or accepted. Either way, it saves the extra page load time and makes it a more “seamless” experience for the user. The Internet is finally truly going stateless, and the challenge posed now by the adaptive path article is as follows: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities. In that regard, I started a project on the weekend that I wasn’t sure was possible: creating a fully secure “ajax”-powered login system, ideal for blogs, forums, and other similar sites. I had a barebones secure case working within a few hours, and a few more hours gave the final result that I will share today. The tutorial itself only explains things and a higher level, not really diving much into the code. It’s this page where all of the good stuff lives. They provide the HTML, the CSS, and all of the Javascript you’ll need to get it up and running, including the PHP script to run the authentication off "

A Comparison of Ajax Frameworks for ASP.NET

A Comparison of Ajax Frameworks for ASP.NET: "As highlighted in this post on the Ajax.NET Professional blog today, there’s a comparison posted of several of the popular Ajax frameworks for those working with ASP.NET (created by Daniel Zeiss). First, let me explain why only these 6 Frameworks are included although there is a lot more AJAX stuff for ASP.NET out there. All the frameworks listed here have one unique AJAX feature: They allow updating page content without programming AJAX directly - i call it indirect AJAX programming - a compareable concept is called Hijax. Therefore, frameworks that supply only controls with built in AJAX-features (Trees, Grids, Lists and so on…) are not included in the comparison. Please forgive me and drop me a note if I forgot a framework that also allows indirect AJAX programming. The list for the comparison includes: ComfortASP.NET V0.45 (beta) MagicAJAX.NET V0.2.2 ComponentArt V3.0 Callback Control and more… He has very detailed charts covering different topics like general information about the package, it’s ASP.NET compatibility, how much “traffic” it generates with its requests, and other additional features. There’s even charts for the traffic (in bytes) for a few different tests he performs with each package. "

User annotations in Ajax

User annotations in Ajax: "IBM developerWorks has posted an Ajax tutorial that allows you to implement user-created sticky notes on your site: The ability to add notes and comments to your Web site can be a powerful and attractive feature for users. This tutorial demonstrates how to implement an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-based ..."

Intuitive Date Input Selection?

Intuitive Date Input Selection?: "“DateBox is a pure JavaScript library using DHTML and advanced Date parsing to generate the date based on the grammar passed. The purpose of DateBox is to simplify the date entering process using grammatical terms we are all familiar with.” “Intuitive” is such a loaded term but let’s play with it. Is this tool intuitive or [...]"

Spongecell - Ajax Calender

Spongecell - Ajax Calender: "Spongecell calendar the easiest online planning tool for friends to share Built on the Ruby on Rails..."

ParticleTree: Preloading Data with Ajax and JSON

ParticleTree: Preloading Data with Ajax and JSON: "In this article from ParticleTree they take the typical Ajax kinds of connections that everyone else is doing and “step it up a notch” by showing you how to prefetch with Ajax and the help of some JSON. On most sites, there are usually only a handful of options that can be done at any given moment and often some of these options are more likely than others. By determining what is important on each page, we can preload the data of the user’s next action and store it on the client with JSON. When the user decides to perform their next action, they’ll see their results almost instantly because the info was loaded in the background. They start things off with a demo of how the application works (for you to get a feel for it), and include a download to help the learning process along. They describe briefly what JSON is and move directly into the code. They break it up into chunks, describing each piece as it goes along. They use the Prototype library to make the creation of things a bit easier as well. They finish it off with the inclusion of pagination abilities and using the navigation to control it. "

A Huge List of Javascript Libraries

A Huge List of Javascript Libraries: "Saddam Azad has a huge post over on his blog today with a pretty comprehensive list of Javascript libraries (including Prototype, AjaxAC, Moo.FX, Rico, and Zimbra). They’re seperated out into sections like “Pure JS Application libraries / Frameworks”, “PHP based AJAX Frameworks”, and “Javascript libs for Flash” with several listings underneath each. Most of the entries include not only links to the library’s homepage, but also links to documentation and demos showing what it can do. Of course, there are some comments about ones that are missing, but this huge list provides more than enough links to keep a developer busy for a long time. "