Archive of published articles on March, 2006
Back homeThe primary new feature ( from my perspective ) was a brand new UI that made use of AJAX, which I built on top of the Prototype JavaScript library. There was a lot of dynamic element creation based on the data coming back from the AJAX calls, and thus a lot of document.createElement calls, along with the appendChild and insertBefore and the element-property-setting statements. It’s very verbose.
The much-anticipated new version 1.1 of Ruby on Rails hit the streets with fanfare a couple of days ago. And while even I am wary of the hyperbole that sometimes surrounds Ajax and Web 2.0, I’m very pleased to say that Ruby on Rails is the genuine article.
Website: http://web2.wsj2.com/ruby_on_rails_11_web_20_on_rocket_fuel.htm
In this article, the first of three parts, you will start creating a simple web-based POP 3 client using AJAX, which will use “XMLHttpRequest” objects to retrieve messages from a mail server.
Website: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/Take-AJAX-to-Your-Email-Inbox-Developing-a-Webbased-POP-3-Client/
Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
I recently found an entirely new way to interact with a website. Last week one of our clients at Ideacodes launched a virtual showroom in Second Life. When you visit Stylehive’s virtual showroom you can see objects that users of the Stylehive website have bookmarked at the website. These objects such as furniture have been rendered in a 3-D format which you can interact with in the virtual space. You can even sit on a sofa or chair and then click on it which will launch your browser, and take you to the users bookmark page of that particular object. Very interactive and very fun.
Ruby? Rails? Ajax? Is this cluster of confusing buzzwords swarming around your head like a mob of angry bees? Then fear not, gentle padawan — Jedi help is at hand! For I, too, was just like you once: confused, jumping at shadows, sinking into the depths of yet another custom Python web framework while softly weeping behind a stack of dog-eared PHP books. But not anymore. Today I build my applications in Ruby on Rails.
Javascript is present on almost every recent web page. But are you sure your scripts work on every browsers?
Website: http://jtf.ploki.info/
The mp3act digital music system is designed to be a central location for your digital music collection and a means to easily organize and listen to your digital media through your stereo, over a local network, or anywhere in the world.
Website: http://mp3act.net/
During my daily reading of the Ruby on Rails mailing list I ran across a post asking about RJS templates. I hadn’t heard of them before and I was intrigued to find out more.
Website: http://www.codyfauser.com/articles/2005/11/20/rails-rjs-templates
I was truly impressed by the development of the Hoverbox Image Gallery written by Nathan Smith of SonSpring. It was great to come across some optimization of the code by Craig Erskine and I thought it was a really creative way to show a collection of images in a gallery.
Website: http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/03/27/suckerfish-hoverlightbox/
Nice downloadable example of balloon tooltips.
Website: http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=bubble_tooltip
Pop-Up windows are a pain in the lower back to use. Years of abuse by advertisers, malicious attackers and phishing attempts have conditioned users to close them immediately or turn on their third party pop-up blocking tool or the browser option to do the same.
We’ve got the language, we’ve go the killer Rails framework, but we’re not quite there yet when it comes to performance. And building applications that scale is tricky in any language. So how do we solve is the Ruby way? How do we make it possible without unnecessary complexity?
Website: http://www.squidoo.com/rubyscale/
lighttpd 1.4.8 was just released and next to a pile of bugfixes we added a new option to fastcgi.server to allow a simple setup of multiple rails app in one virtual host.
Website: http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2005/11/23/lighttpd-1-4-8-and-multiple-rails-apps
In most cases the news is presented in a rather boring but usable way. Newsmap show us a new way to look at world trends in news reporting through their Google News mashup. As they say on their website, “It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.” One other aspect of Newsmap that was a great user experience was the instant language translation. Newsmap will be one of my daily reads from now on.
RTOC is an statistics script that uses flatfiles to store data. It includes an onine users counter as well as a unique hits counter that stores unique hits for that day aswell as a total. It uses JavaScript to update itself dynamicly, so that all stats are in real-time!
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 repeatedly was how to handle gracefully a network outage or the webserver going down. For example, Gmail’s chat handles it nicely. When I turn off my airport connection Gmail chat lets me know that it can’t contact the server and maybe my connection is down. Much better than an endlessly spinning hour glass, or worse, not letting the user know their action was never completed.
Website: http://codejanitor.com/wp/ajax-timeouts-with-prototype/
Stage 2 contains MySQL tuning tips, tuning of FastCGI dispatchers, and further system optimization techniques.
Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/20/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-2
While a couple of high-traffic sites are being powered by Rails and while the Rails book has a handful of instructions to scale your application, it was apparent for us that you’re on your on at a certain point. This series of articles is meant to serve more as a case study as opposed to a generic “How To Scale Your Rails Application” piece of writing, which may or may not be possible to write. I’m outlining what we did to improve our applications’ performance, your mileage may obviously vary.
Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/13/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-1
This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. As such, I cover some basics (MVC, locations of files) and move from there to a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers).
Website: http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/03/21/rails-for-designers