Who’d a thunk it: CSSHttpRequest is a way of doing cross-domain AJAX by using CSS’ @import method to fetch the data.

Google Gears: create web apps that work offline

google, offline ajax, web development, ajax, offline, google gears

Matty discovered jQuery at The Ajax Experience, and his enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.

jQuery makes coding JavaScript fun again. Well, at least it makes it possible to write code and content separately. And that means that sweet AJAXy pages can be made more easily, and it sort of forces designers to make them accessible from the start.

Resources:

• jQuery: JavaScript Library
• Getting Started with jQuery
• Visual jQuery 1.0 (Automated)
• jQuery: Plugins

ajax, javascript, jquery, matt batchelder

Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.

Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to jump to other search engines.

Garrett Murray’s ManiacalRage is an interesting blog on its own, but he’s also doing some good AJAX on his search interfaces. Look first at the archive search. But also take some time to appreciate the new content search. Sure, you’ll have some complaints, but it’s his site and not yours and there are some ideas there that are pretty interesting and useful.

live, search, live search, livesearch, ajax, ahah, javascript, web, web applications, library, libraries

Zach made me take another look at Zimbra, the web-based, web 2.0-smart, very social and AJAXed up collaboration, email, and calendar suite (plus some other goodies).

Go ahead, watch the Flash-based demo or kick the tires with their hosted demo. I think you’ll agree that it looks better than anything else we’ve seen yet. Part of the success of the project is that the developers appear to understand the problem. Here’s the list of how broken email is from the white paper:

• Email has changed dramatically since the advent of the World-wide Web
• The number of messages per day is up by an order of magnitude or more
• The amount of storage required for our mailboxes is up by two orders of magnitude or more
• Email has grown from the original one-to-one communication model to also include one-to-many (as mailing lists have displaced bulletin boards)
• Email applications are often responsible for managing calendars, group scheduling, contacts, tasks, public folders, and so on
• Email applications also often manage shared documents (think “content management-lite”) and even ad hoc document-oriented workflow among users
• Email applications are expected to trap ever more sophisticated and ever higher volumes of spam and viruses
• Email platforms are growing into unified messaging platforms by incorporating support for fax, voicemail, and instant messaging (including integrated anti-spam and anti-virus)
• Email applications are now also being asked to implement retention and discovery policies (such as for compliance with Sarbanes Oxley)

You can also call me a fan of these two lines:

[E]mail has changed sufficiently that we’re no longer quite sure what to call it: Enterprise messaging? Groupware? Collaboration?

Given the amount of time IT-intensive employees spend on email, it is ironic that innovation has reached consumer mail (e.g., gigabyte mailboxes for Google and Yahoo! users) ahead of enterprise mail!

tags: ajax, calendaring, collaboration, communication, communication model, demo, email, enterprise, groupware, groupware collaboration, mail, mailboxes, spam management, unified messaging, web 2.0, zimbra

Top 10 Ajax Applications at A Venture Forth.

ajax, top ten, web applications

I have plans to apply AJAX to our library catalog but I’m running into a problem where I can’t do XMLHttpRequest events to servers other than the one I loaded the main webpage from. Mozilla calls it the “same origin policy,” everyone else calls it a cross-domain script exclusion, or something like that.

Some Mozilla folks are working on a standard to address the problem, but it could be quite a while before browser support is common enough to build for it.

So Plan A was to use simple AJAX with XMLHTTPRequest. Plan B comes from this crazy suggestion at Apple’s developer site: Remote Scripting with IFRAME. It looks like different functions are subject to different restrictions, so the theory is that a JavaSctript loaded in a page in a hidden IFRAME can call functions from the parent page and do pretty much everything we’ve come to expect of XMLHTTPRequest. Here’s an example they offer.

Crazy as it is it works, and it gets around some cross-domain script exclusions for some browsers, but it still gets trapped by Mozilla.

tags: ajax, apple, browser security, browsers, cross domain, cross domain script exclusion, frustration, iframe, javascript, mozilla, remote scripting, web application, web applications, xdomain, xmlhttprequest