The Web 2.0 Blog

Flash Vs AJAX

AJAX is very much the new kid on the block, he’s smart, he’s popular and damn, all the ladies love him. A bit like the Fonz in some respects. One flash of that jacket (read: no refresh forms with fancy effects) and everyone is swooning. The problem with AJAX, much like the Fonz, is that its all too easy to overlook the flaws.

So what exactly are the problems with the Fonz? Well for starters, he was awfully promiscuous, so inevitibly, for the time, was a carrier of multiple STDs, then theres the hair, surely a fire hazard if ever I saw one. Wait, I’ve expanded on the wrong point there (eyyyyyy etc.). So what are the problems with Ajax, and just whats going on in the world of Flash (would Flash be Tom Bosley possibly?). Read on…

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Updating my Web Design Toolbelt

I’ve just embarked on a new project and I thought it was time to update the tools I use, just to streamline things a bit and make sure development is as easy as it could be.

First up is the editor. As a recent Mac convert I needed something to take the place of Notepad++, my Windows editor of choice. Well that was fairly easy, I had a look round and kept coming across Text Wrangler, BBedit’s little brother, and its fantastic. In fact it easily surpasses the usability ot Notepad++. Could I find a replacement for my favourite FTP client, SmartFTP as well? Again its a resounding yes! Initially I started using Transmit, the award winning Mac FTP client, and yes, I can see why its award winning. In fact it’s as easy to use as finder and shares much of the functionality. Eventually though (read 30 days trial ran out) I moved over to Cyberduck ftp which actually comes close to matching the functionality of Transmit, and only falls slightly short in terms of stability and usability. But its free and unlimited, which suits the tightwad in me. There is also the integration with Text Wrangler, which means that if you open a file in Text Wrangler, through Cyberduck, saving the file will save it on the server, which really streamlines the ediitng process. Text Wrangler itself offers saving over FTP but you will always need a fully featured FTP client at some point.

The next items I added to my toolbelt were FireFox extensions. I already had the Web Developer Toolbar, which, if you don’t use it, is simply astonishing. It just makes everything you could ever want to do so simple. I simply could not live without it. Iw as dissapointed to learn that the eyedropper mode of color zilla does not work on Mac, which means I’ve had to drop that from my toolbelt, which is unfortunate as it was really usefull. I thought it would be worth seeing what else was out there, and boy am I glad I did.

The first extension I came across is called Fangs. Fangs does a great job of visually interpreting the output of screen readers. This is a must have if you care about accessibility, of course to be used in conjunction with this article on accessibility. Next I came across an extension called View Source Chart, which visually formats source code by grouping block elements and their children together and highlighting them in colour. It may sound fairly trivial but it really helps you find errors quickly. You simply would not believe how much of a difference using this entension, in conjunction with the highlight block level elements feature of the Web Developer Toolbar, makes debugging your HTML. Especially if you use dynamically generated code from a CMS, Forum of Blog.

In addition to these tools, I use the Gimp for images, Safari for testing and IE on a seperate Windows Machine for testing. I also tend to use the superb script.aculo.us scripting library and a set of key PHP classes that I wrote a good while ago and have been serving me well. Theres also a whole host of bookmarks that I’ve got that help me out with colour schemes and commonly used layout techniques, including my own.
Whats your development environment like? Any tips for a recent Mac convert? What can’t you do without? One thing I will say, however, is that I simply cannot get a working PHP/MySQL/Apache environment working on my machine, and I’ve tried everything. Anyone with a familiar experience?

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Google launches AJAX Toolkit

Following on from Macrodobe, Google has launched an AJAX toolkit imaginatively titled the Google Web Toolkit, or GWT for those in the acronym business! It looks like an interesting addition to the world of AJAX toolkits. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to try out some of the AJAX Frameworks at some point soon, I’ve got an interesting test planned that should cover it. I am slightly concerned by some of the examples given, for an AJAX toolkit it seems odd to give examples of embedded iFrames (which was a technology used before AJAX to achieve similar effects) and nested Tables. I’m sure it can be used for some nice, valid, symantic XHTML though…

To see what the GWT (God it grates already) I’d recommend checking out the example page called the “Kitchen Sink” which just shows what you can do.

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Build your own AJAX RSS Reader

As a way to really throw the car amongst the pigeons in the world of personalised homepages and feed readers, IBM Developer Works has an excellent article on how to build your very own AJAX RSS Reader. So go ahead and give it a try, you too can own your own Web 2.0 Startup, all you need is a niche, how about a green logo, I’ve not seen any of those recently…

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Macrodobe Launch Spry AJAX Framework

If this wasn’t from Macromedia (aka Adobe) this probably wouldn’t make this blog but hey, what you going to do. They have launched Spry, which can be downloaded from here, which is an AJAX framework similar to prototype. The interesting thing about SPRY is its close interaction with Flash and more interestingly Flex, the XML Flash Framework also from Adobe.

I’m hoping to put up some AJAX framework reviews in a few days (i.e when life stops) and Spry wasn’t on my original list (because, well, it didn’t exist) but its certainly made it on there now. A release from such a major industry player has to be addressed. As a die-hard Flash critic I shall be completely ignoring the Flex/Flash integration and concentrating on the AJAXy goodness that lies within. If you have any experience with Spry, or Prototype for that matter, drop us a line in the comments.

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Google Calendar and its immediate future

Theres an interesting article over at zdnet that examines some of the code for Google’s new Calandar tool. Interestingly, they seem to uncover some placeholder code for completeable events, which point towards some form of tasking implementation coming soon. Lets hope so, and lets hope they really think through the integration this time.

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Utopian AJAX

Not very long ago, I wrote an article called The AJAX Sham and it was fairly critical of the way in which AJAX is used today. Not necessarily the technology but more why sites are using AJAX and how marketing types have attached themselves to the term incorrectly. Given that article I thought I should try and balance things a bit by explaining how I think AJAX should be used and why many services are missing an opportunity with the technology.

As I exlained in the earlier article, there are many sites that are using XML just for the sake of it. They aren’t actually utilising the features of XML, its ust being used as an easy to manage middleman between the Javascript and the Database. The problem with this is that the true potential of XML is not being utilised. In fact, some of the features are being subverted in order for XML to fit into this new Web 2.0 framework.
XML has gained such a strong following in the IT world because of its extensible nature, the simple human readable format and the fact that it adds a level of semantics to the data. In many AJAX implementations none of these features are being used. Thats like buying a car and using it as a table, its just such a waste. So how can we put these features to work in our AJAX implementations?

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The AJAX Sham

In case your wondering, I chose the title very carefully. A sham doesn’t necessarily mean something negative, just something dressed to appear like its something else. So why is this thing we call AJAX a sham and whats it hiding? More importantly, are we, as users/developers, being sold short? Or is it for our own good.

To answer these questions we need to look at the current implementations of AJAX and the hierarchical nature of web applications. Typically, web applications sit on a three layer architecture. These have been called many different things but essentially the boil down to a layer to deal with presentation, a layer to deal with the logic and a layer to deal with the data. An example would be HTML at the presentation layer, PHP doing the logic and a MySQL database at the back end. Previously, if you were to throw Javascript into the mix it would sit in the presentation layer. So why has this new breed of web applications changed the way we think about these layers?

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Judicial use of AJAX - 6 Guidelines

AJAX is certainly a hot topic at the moment which has led to a number of sites using AJAX where its not necessary or appropriate. This is similar to the situation we found ourselves in when Javascript, Images, Animated Gifs, Flash, *insert hot new thing here* and pretty much every other facet that makes up websites came into being. At the moment, this means that the sign of a good design isn’t how its used AJAX but more where its chosen not to use AJAX. We can cheat a little by following some simple rules when deciding whether to AJAXify a function or not.

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ajaxSketch - Review

I covered ajaxWrite a few posts ago and there will be a more detailed review coming up. But until then I thought I’d give you a quick run through of ajaxSketch. ajaxSketch is essentially a web based version of inkscape (or Illustrator as the devs claim). For the purpose of this review I’m going to discount the critiscism I aimed at ajaxWrite, specifically the lack of collaborative features. So this is squarely focused on the functionality and limited within the scope of the application.

So essentially ajaxSketch is a simple image creation tool. Its not aiming to compete with something like photoshop or necessary Inkscape (despite the claims of the site). As far as I am concerned the only use I can see for this is for quickly knocking up some graphs or other simple images that use rudimentary shapes.

When I first heard about ajaxSketch I actually got quite excited. The main reason for this was the fact that SVG was being used to handle all of the graphical legwork. I’ve long been an advocate of SVG and still feel its been underutilised and misunderstood to a certain extent. Of course the lack of support and public awareness are two major hurdles that need to be overcome. In fact I utilised SVG as part of my Final Year Project whilst studying for my degree, and boy did it serve me well. The ability to add scripted events to objects inline and the object orientated approach were huge bonuses.

So how well does ajaxSketch live up to my expectations? (more…)

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