Category: XHTML

Ajax roundup

I’ve been reading Ajaxian Blog, among others, recently, and here’s a roundup of some Ajax based links I’ve come across.

  • Sajax — This one is really cool. Basically, it’s an Ajax client/server framework that includes backends written in ASP, ColdFusion, Io, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. That’s a mouthful. I haven’t had time to play with it, but looking at the html source for their examples (they have a calculator and a simple chat program on their website)
  • Dojo Toolkit — Dojo holds lots of promise, and, to be fair, it’s still in early development. Right now, they’ve got their basic “io” package available, and that’s what does the Ajax. Besides that, they plan on releasing a full javascript library of ajax enabled widgets, which is really, really cool. Some of the developers work for Jot, which is sort of a wiki-meets-excel macros company aiming to do lots of cool things to get at the “long tail” of application development that’s currently filled by simple excel macros. Oh, and other devs worked on previous projects like nwidgets, prototype, and f(m).
  • Prototype
  • f(m) — This one is pretty neat, it’s a Javascript / Emcascript implementation of many of Microsoft’s .NET framework objects. I think you’d really have to whack yourself in the head to start using this, but once you did, it’d be pretty neat.
  • Wick — Web Input Completion Kit — Basically, this is a simple Ajax toolkit for doing auto completion a la google suggest, but with your choice of data. That’s what’s there now. They plan on releasing quite a bit more than just this, though.
  • Sack of Ajax — This one is pretty much the simplest Ajax kit out there. All it does is perform an ajax call (based on the URL you provide) and put the results in a div class you specify. Simple, but it might not do enough for your tastes.
  • Ajaxing the Address Bar This is just a fairly straightforward discussion of how you can do more with ajax + search than google suggest. You can actually drive the search via ajax, which is interesting, though I’m not sure how usable it will be. It’s certainly interesting. Someone has to have come up with Google search results via API key driven by ajax by now. I can’t really think of how this would end up producing a better search experience for me — I mean, I’m pretty efficient w/ google searching, using firefox tabs, etc. Search rethought of as placing results in a “shopping cart” to be saved would be a neat idea.

    Actually, I’d like to see a greasemonkey plugin for posting things to delicious easier. That would be cool.

Dive into Greasemonkey

I’ve been interested in Greasemonkey, a plugin for firefox that lets you customize webpages as you view them. That’s right, it lets you change a webpage or pages on the client, without the server having the slightest clue.

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to learn more about how it works, so when I ran across Dive Into Greasemonkey, I thought, “hey, cool”

So i’m off reading this crap about greasemonkey, now. What will i figure out first, Greasemonkey or Dojo/Ajax?

Ugh. I am too compelled to figure this shit out.

Javascript Dynamic List Creation

So you want to have your javascript dynamically add structure to your page without reloading. Yes, you can do this, and it all comes down to the document.createElement function, which works in at least Firefox 1.0.3, IE 6, and Konqueror.

How to do this? It’s actually a fairly simple javascript function that does this:


function listAdd(input)
{
// Input mode
var list = document.getElementById('thelist');
var element = document.createElement("LI");
element.innerHTML=input;
list.appendChild(element);
}

First off, we get an element named ‘thelist’ — this is the OL or UL tag enclosing your list. Then, we create a new element. In this case, it’s a “LI” element. Next, we use the innerHTML property to set what goes inside the LI and /LI tags — in other words, innerHTML is what’s inside the tags. Finally, we use the appendChild function to add the element we created to the list.

The end result can be seen and tested here.

Overall, it’s a fairly simple but highly effective little technique that you can add to your bag of tricks.