Slashdot | Ajax in Action

A Shorter, More Direct Alternative
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kimanaw (795600) Alter Relationship on Wednesday November 23, @01:48PM (#14102798)
I read the sample chapters of the reviewed book and was underwhelmed. Chapter 4 spent way too much time trying to sound "impressive", with lots of UML diagrams and Design Patterns references. Plus, 615 pages for AJAX ? Unless 400 of those pages are weblinks to online references, I'm afraid its just killing a lot of trees.

I just picked up Foundations of Ajax [apress.com], and its a good, focused 273 pages, of which nearly half is resources and tools for implementing. I haven't had a chance to download and try out the examples, but the reference links all look like great resources. While I wish they'd skipped the usual Chapter 1 "Here's the history of the web" that any reader of the subject matter already knows, all in all, its a great way to cut thru the BS and get rolling with the AJAX concepts.

In summary:

* If you want to learn UML, buy a UML book
* If you want to learn Design Patterns, buy the GangofFour book.
* If you already know how to put together a webpage, write some Javascript, and maybe a little CSS, and just want to understand how it all to hangs together in AJAX, then Foundations of Ajax [apress.com] is probably a better choice than "Ajax in Action".

--
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
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Ajax Killed Himself

(Score:5, Insightful)

by laoc00n (933461) on Wednesday November 23, @02:17PM (#14103029)

Take a reliable, stateful transport protocol (TCP) and lobotomize it so that connection state gets thrown away. This is http. Take a platform-independent object technology (Java) and lobotomize it so that dumb xml data structures get passed to "stateless" objects (in other words, procedures), and all processing must happen at one end of the connection. This is Web applications. Take gui technology and lobotomize it so that screens must refresh one page at a time. This is a browser. So: having gone from a world of functional, stateful, distributed applications engineered to a true software model, we are now back (despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about "objects") to procedural programming and dumb terminals (meaning Web browsers). In other words, 1970s technology with pictures. Any half-wit can see that this situation is broken. How do we fix it? The Ajax answer is to keep all of the lobotomized bits and build increasingly Byzantine layers on top of the existing mess in order to re-introduce the capabilities that were hacked off in the first place. Brilliant.

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AJAX inthe Real World

(Score:5, Informative)

by Heembo (916647) <jim AT manico DOT net> on Wednesday November 23, @01:49PM (#14102804)

In may ways, that book is out-of-date. Here is what is working for me *today*. There are many possibiliites, but my focus is Rapid Application Development - and these tools help me rock and roll, fast.

Last week I was tasked to replace several standard (but sometimes complex) HTML business forms with an AJAX solution. Here are the best tools I found after lots of research time. This is bleeding edge; but functional in Opera, Safari, IE XP, FF XP, FF OSX, no small feat.

1) AJFORM - submit a form via Javascript using HTTP post or get without refreshing the page. (next release in a few days, keep an eye on it, its brilliant and easy to use) http://redredmusic.com/brendon/ajform/ [redredmusic.com] 2) YOUR SERVER CODE - I use Java, but anything including ASP, CF, PHP - its all works. (Standard HTTP). Just needs to spit out XML, easy feat. 3) GOOGLES XPATH LIB - those of you who use Sarissa, drop it - she does not support Safari. Google's XPATH lib does, well, on all browsers you need. http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] - this is the best and easiest way to "search into" XML data. You can use native DOM calls, but it takes about 10x as much time to get it right.

With AJFORM and Googles XPATH lib on the client, I was able to quickly and effectively start making business forms in AJAX that were "scarry fast" and WOW'ed all the folks who are paying the bills! YAY!

Whats your architecture for AJAX?

--
Worlds Easiest AJAX Toolkit AJFORM [redredmusic.com]

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http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
"Web 2.0 and ..."
2. Democracy

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. [2] I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.

The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

.../... At Y Combinator we advise all the startups we fund never to lord it over users. Never make users register, unless you need to in order to store something for them. If you do make users register, never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need it for some reason. Don't ask them any unnecessary questions. Never send them email unless they explicitly ask for it. Never frame pages you link to, or open them in new windows. If you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted. And if you find yourself asking "should we allow users to do x?" just answer "yes" whenever you're unsure. Err on the side of generosity. .../...

The ultimate way to be nice to users is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. During the 90s a lot of people probably thought we'd have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.

.../...There's another thing all three components of Web 2.0 have in common. Here's a clue. Suppose you approached investors with the following idea for a Web 2.0 startup:

Sites like del.icio.us and flickr allow users to "tag" content with descriptive tokens. But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links. Moreover, these links represent a social network connecting the individuals and organizations who created the pages, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the reputation of each member. We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches.