Archive of published articles on February, 2006
Back homeA modular AJAX Wordpress theme. My vision was to have a fully customisable layout like seen on MyYahoo or NetVibes.com and maybe some neat effects here and there… On my first attempts I failed badly and thought I will never be able to make it, but then I stumbled over the brand-new script.aculo.us Web 2.0 JavaScript.
Website: http://www.bloxpress.org/
After tiring of over hyped ajax frameworks trying to hide the guts that make ajax programming fun I decided to share my recipe for easy to make ajax applications where you still have control over everything, but the setup of it all is handled for you. This is a basic state of mind system rather than a framework. I offer you four files and a design pattern that allows you to focus on making things happen rather than setting things up. This is designed for PHP5 but can be written for php4 if people are interested.
Website: http://litfuel.net/mybic/
Have you ever wanted SSH or telnet access to your system from an “internet desert” – from behind a strict firewall, from an internet cafe, or even from a mobile phone? Anyterm can use almost any web browser and even works through firewalls. Anyterm consists of some Javascript on a web page, an XmlHttpRequest channel on standard ports back to the server, and an Apache module.
Website: http://anyterm.org/
AJAX Extended is a JavaScript class that improves the standard XMLHttpRequest features. The most important enhancement — it breaks the cross-domain policy rules. It is possible to get data from any source, any domain and parse it with your JS scripts. Feel excited? Just keep on reading. AJAX Extended has the same properties, methods and events as the native browser implementation. You don’t have to rewrite your code — just plug in the AJAX Extended and you’re in business.
Website: http://ajaxextended.com/
I’ve seen a few questions about doing pagination with AJAX, and I don’t like the thought of it. It smells of accessibility problems. I’ve addressed this issue before in my own toy pages (since I don’t actually write production web code), so thought I’d share it.
Website: http://bluesmoon.blogspot.com/
This article guides you through the AJAX basics and gives you two simple hands-on examples to get you started.
Website: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started
This article shows how to use Ajax techniques to make web apps with REST APIs.
Website: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2006/02/23/using-rest-with-ajax.html
You might have been in a situation before where you had a list of items in your database that needed to be output in a specific order. These items could be anything: perhaps a listing of your favourite movies or your favourite books. For whatever reason, you want them ordered in a custom way that can’t be determined automatically (such as alphabetical). This article covers the implementation of a system that lets you easily define the order of such a list.
Website: http://www.phpriot.com/d/articles/client-side/sortable-lists-with-php-and-ajax/index.html
I’ve been using CSS tabs for many years now and have always wished they had a bit more functionality. AJAX Tabs uses the time tested Sliding Doors method for CSS tabs and implements a very useful AJAX layer. This functionality could add some very dynamic user interaction. Among a few of the features offered are, the ability to specify default open tabs, AJAX preloading, and tab based javascript events. Think of the possibilities.
BloxPress has created the first completely modular AJAX theme for a popular blog software. Their vision was to create a MyYahoo or NetVibes.com like interface with a blog backend. The user experience is superb with drag and drop modules, RSS, Flickr, etc… You can also add or delete as many modules as you like by simply clicking the Add / Remove Content link under the logo. Reseting to the original default settings is facilitated easily by clicking one link. Hopefully, at some point this type of web 2.0 / AJAX theme will be available for all of the major blogs API’s.
With Thumbstacks.com, you can make presentations – like slideshows, or outlines – right in your web browser. When you’re done, you can share your presentations with anyone, anywhere, just by sending them a link.
Website: http://www.thumbstacks.com/
Wufoo is a web-based tool to help you build and host amazing online forms. In only a few short minutes, you can create a mailing list, a marketing survey or even a complete customer management system.
Website: http://wufoo.com/
CSS Tabs seem to be all the rage with the kids these days. I love the idea of them. It seems that the most popular method of creating tabs using CSS is the Sliding Doors method. They seem to look the coolest and are very easy to implement. However, they’re so… static. I’ve taken the idea of the sliding door tabs and mixed them up with a little javascript and ajax to make them very dynamic on the client side.
Website: http://www.havocstudios.com/articles/ajax/ajax_tabs/
They’ve been around since forever, and they all work the same way. You have a page full of thumbnails, and when you click one, you get a page with a larger version. What if thumbnails could grow into full images seamlessly right on the same page?
Website: http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/06/08/index2a.html
The user experience for most online calendaring systems is slow, non-ituitive, and frustrating. The thing that usually turns me off first about online calendaring is the constant page reloading. Reloading the calendar to add, delete, and edit entries is time consuming and cumbersome. Spongecell, solves all of these issues with the intelligent use AJAX features and widgets. For me the highlights include drag and drop event times into any date, instant event editing via AJAX popovers, and a fast send to friend feature. A great user experience!
The twin tasks of the XMLHttp are handling the HTTP request, and then processing the XML response. The first one is easily done by writing the appropriate syntax for creating this object. This is what is accomplished in AJAX by invoking the new constructor for XMLHTTP object.
Website: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/Roaming-through-XMLDOM-An-AJAX-Prerequisite/
You don’t have to write any javascript, but if you want you’re free to do so and you can mix as you want, use TinyAjax automatically generated code and your own existing scripts. You can also export global functions and a class-functions in the same page. – metz.se
In a day when many users have dozens if not hundreds of feeds, ratings and reputations systems are becoming increasingly important in the web 2.0 space. Ajaxian has implemented a nice wordpress hack of the votio rating system.The AJAX user generated ratings system is intuitive and fun to use. A good user experience with instant results.
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 1280×960 and a widescreen 1440×900 version.
AJAX blog focusing on new AJAX developments.
Website: http://ajax.phpmagazine.net/