Rich Internet applications (RIAs) can provide opportunities to design much better user experiences. They can be faster, more engaging and much more usable. However, this improvement is not without its downside—RIAs are much more difficult to design than the previous generation of page-based applications. The richer interaction requires a better ...   Read Article.

In getting to know Prototype a little better, I decided to go through the latest version of the Prototype library (1.5.0_pre0) and detail every method and property that was available. In doing so, I got a much better understanding of how the code works. Here are the files in a 1280x960 and a widescreen 1440x900 ...   Read Article.

Uh oh! Here comes yet another technology buzzword. This time it’s “AJAX”. In addition to being a household cleaner, a character from Greek mythology, and the name of a European soccer club, AJAX is Asynchronous communication, JavaScript, and XML. These technologies, which are already present in your browser, make it possible to retrieve ...   Read Article.

Over the past year many new AJAX homepages, aka personalized start pages, have been introduced to the market. Microsoft and Google have offerings, as do a host of small startups. First I'll define what an AJAX homepage is, then I'll do a feature comparison between the ...   Read Article.

First, let me explain why only these 11 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. To make it ...   Read Article.

There’s little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity. But it’s really hard, right? It involves all the nasty JavaScript that no one ever does often enough to get really ...   Read Article.

Mats Henricson has posted 12 perfect cases on his blog for the use of Ajax. He gives an explanation for all of the twelve cases along with some examples.He quotes "I’ve spent quite some time creating a 2 hour long Ajax course in Swedish. At the end of the course I list 12 cases where I think Ajax is a perfect fit, inspired by Alex Bosworth’s 10 ...   Read Article.

AJAX-faced web applications can follow you, like all web apps. Most of us have at least one friend who traveled around the world and kept in touch via email with hotmail or yahoo e-mail accounts. In fact, these browser-based email interfaces helped drive the adoption of email for personal use. These days, using a more traditional html ...   Read Article.

I’ve hoped for a while that Prototype would implement something similar to what JQuery has going on for DOM elements. The current Element object in Prototype is packed full of great stuff, but how you access those methods isn’t exactly ...   Read Article.

Screen readers mostly work by plugging into IE or Firefox and reading what's on the screen. It doesn't matter how it got there. More advanced ones actually let you fire off onmouseover and onclick events using the keyboard and will inform the listener that there is an action worth considering. That's more feedback than sighted users ...   Read Article.

Ajax techniques are used in several popular pages, including Google Maps and Gmail. The main characteristic of Ajax applications is in the letter A. Asynchronous. In an Ajax application, the HTML page the server sends to the browser includes code that allows to use the browser as a client for different services. This code runs in the background ...   Read Article.

This document was written by Rick Bradley as part of their IS Applications group’s process of (re)evaluating platforms for deployment of a large-scale healthcare application (“the CenterNet rewrite”—discussed on the Rails mailing list). This evaluation document was prepared in September of 2005 and is therefore already out of date ...   Read Article.

Just got back from the Real World AJAX seminar in NYC on Monday. Pretty good event with lots of good stories.One issue that caught my attention was the issue of how the back-end returned the data to AJAX applications. Most of the speakers preferred data, except for David Hansson from Ruby on Rails seemed to favor markup as the return type (at ...   Read Article.

Justin Palmer has written CSS event:Selectors using prototype, a method to cleanly use CSS pseudo selectors to assign DOM events to elements on the page.He writes "Over the past 6 months or so Javascript has really gotten a lot of attention. I can’t name a web application released in the previous months (although I’m sure there are a few) that ...   Read Article.

I'll demonstrate the benefits of AJAX using a test case application for a chemical sales company. First, I'll illustrate the immediate advantages by using an application that I built for a medical insurance company a few years ago that allowed customers to proximity search for medical providers ...   Read Article.

This method is one that I toyed around with for a while and I'll admit that its pretty simple and clean but there are some drawbacks. We're going to make a few assumptions: All requests will be GET (this is to keep things simple for this example) and we will keep the complexity of .htaccess sweetness out of these examples and assume that ...   Read Article.

Over CodeJanitor.com Json has written a script using the prototype, that checks the server and, with the help of a timeout setting, can gracefully let the user know it’s inaccessible.He Writes "I’ve been implementing some AJAX goodness in Mayday and other FastFrame apps lately. In my reading of the various pitfalls of AJAX one that popped up ...   Read Article.

Yvo has implemented an ajax version of the CSS star rating on yvoschaap.com, He writes So, i found this great star rater script made in css. But i missed the web 2.0 stuff. So i played arround with it so it would work on a database without having to refresh any pages (but updating the database with AJAX). In this version i use it for rating a ...   Read Article.

Ken Cochrane have posted a simple tutorial on creating the Ajax upload progress bar using struts and DWR.He writes "Over the course of the last year or so I have been hearing a lot about AJAX, and how cool it is, and what neat stuff you can do with it. At first I wasn't too impressed, mostly because I have heard it all before. It ...   Read Article.

An old web technology is slowly being resurrected from the depths of history. Browser features that have gone untouched for years are once again being employed to bring better responsiveness to UIs. Servers are learning to cope with a new way of doing things. And I’m not talking about ...   Read Article.