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.

Mashup Podcasting

On the way into work this morning, I listened to the mutantpop.net podcast for the first time. All I can say is WOW. Mashups are really getting amazing.

Jungle brothers mixed with Ray Charles, Gorillaz w/ some Brit rapper I can’t remember, this is seriously good shit. Extremely well produced.

I guess, the thing is, if you’ve got someone sifting through the mashups, only playing you the best ones, you end up with the cream of the crop.

Oh, and I found out something interesting. Dangermouse, the guy who made the Beatles/Jay-Z mashup, The Grey Album, is the producer for the newest Gorillaz album, which I’ve been listening to. It’s decent — I don’t think it’s as good as their first album, but it’s pretty good.

All powerful email client of the future incorporating current memes

Ok, big enough title? Simple idea.

I think it would be interesting for there to be an emai -> todo list convergence app, with the following features.

  1. Let all email be tagged both automatically (text scan) and by hand
  2. Allow easy manual tagging (possibly w/ tree-based tag finding)
  3. Allow filters that will automatically tag mail based on features of the mail (from an individual, from a mailing list, with a subject line, etc.
  4. Allow ‘views’ of mail to be created that shows mail based on how the mail is tagged
  5. Allow todo items to be created easily from mail
  6. Allow tags to be associated w/ todo lists and todo list items

Obligatory Star Wars post

So I saw Episode 3 today, and, personally, I wasn’t disappointed. I think they did a pretty good job w/ the story they had to tell. I think the biggest problem with ep 1-3 is that the basic STORY isn’t as good. The original movies were an epic battle, underdog vs. big empire. It made really good storytelling.

Episodes 1-3 are basically the “back story” — Of course, ep 1 and 2 could have been better movies, but I think Ep 3 was about as good as I could have hoped for.

I think the effects were great, I loved General Grievous’s 4 light sabre trick, I loved the wookies, the space dogfighting scenes, the epic large cruiser combat, etc.

I don’t know why Grievous had a beating heart — what was up with that? And why was he always coughing? And what the hell was the 30 second add-on at the end about Obi-wan talking to Qui-gon? WTF? Why throw that in unless they’re going to use that in the TV series, of which Lucas has apparently signed a deal for two of.

Oh, and the biggest problem with the whole star wars franchise is that George Lucas was going for more of a “Pulp Sci Fi” feel, which people don’t get. Most people saw it as kids and liked it, now they don’t 25 years later. of course it’s kinda corny at times, that’s just how it is.

I wish I had time to play some more MMORPGs, It’s be cool to play some Star Wars Galaxies about now.