February 2005 Archives

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Social Bookmarks

Feb 18

If you haven't heard about Social Bookmarking by now then where have you been?

Web sites such as delicious, spurl, furl, simpy, openbm and linkroll all allow you to add your own website bookmarks to their site. You can reference your favorite bookmarks at anytime by logging in or by visiting your own personal link (e.g. http://del.icio.us/cueball).

There is also a site called spiderous that takes a feed from all the popular social bookmarking sites for your viewing pleasure.


Filed under:
Misc

FormSIX - Form Simple Interface in XML

Feb 24

FormSIX stands for Form Simple Interface in XML. It comprises of an XML parser writen entirely in JavaScript.

The purpose of FormSIX is the extend the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) by using XML as a transport mechanism where Client - Server communication is achieved using XML.


Filed under:
Scripting

Clean web applications with Ajax

Feb 25

Adaptive path have created a new buzzword called 'Ajax' (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML), and they say it is 'A New Approach to Web Applications'. However I tend to disagree to a certain extent.

Web applications have been using asynchronous client to server communications for years, we have used Javascript to Java (server side) communications and Java Applet to Server side communications.

I remember working on a theatre booking website (back in 1998) where by we used an applet in a pixel wide frame, it was used to manage communications between other frames and back to the server. Looking back it was so difficult to maintain; a number of frames in a frameset all talking to one another via the main applet controller. If I remember rightly it was also rather slow.

So with Ajax I feel we are revisiting old ground, however with improved bandwidth and better implementation methods we may be able to bring this idea of web application development back to life.

To sum up, I知 still wary of maintenance issues in web applications that use Ajax. Surely by using an MVC server side framework it will be easier to maintain, as this would deter the developer from using client side logic which is so often difficult to test and maintain in the long run.


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Filed under:
Web design