Ajaxian

Friday, April 29th, 2005

Using DWR with Spring and Hibernate

Category: Ajax, Java, JavaScript

Matt Raible has written up his experience using DWR with Spring and Hibernate.

Matt also kinda put up a movie showing the Ajax features at work.

Very nice and clean. A good view of DWR, and nice Ajax techniques (e.g. changing from view to edit mode).

Posted by Dion Almaer at 1:13 am
1 Comment

3.1 rating from 33 votes

Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

SmartClient 5.2: Another Ajaxian Toolkit

Category: Ajax, Component

SmartClient is another Ajaxian piece of software that is:

• an open DHTML/AJAX client engine
• rich user interface components & services
• client-server databinding systems

Take it for a Test drive to see what you think. Some interesting examples there.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 1:19 am
3 Comments

2.8 rating from 15 votes

JavaScript Shell for Browsers

Category: JavaScript

Found an interesting JavaScript Shell: A command-line interface for JavaScript and DOM.

Features

• You can enter statements and expressions at the same prompt.
• The result of each non-void statement or expression is shown.
• User-defined variables.
  • b = document.body
• User-defined functions.
  • function f() { return 5; }
• JavaScript error messages are shown in red.
• Previous statements and expressions are available through Up and Down arrow keys.
• Tab completion.
• Multiline input (Shift+Enter to insert a line break).
• If the shell is opened using a bookmarklet, JavaScript typed into the shell runs in the context of the original window.
• Works well in Firefox, mostly works in Opera 8 and in IE 6 for Windows.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 1:13 am
5 Comments

3.8 rating from 12 votes

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

Confluence gives us nice Ajax usage

Category: Ajax, Java, XmlHttpRequest

Atlassian has added a few new features to their new versions of Confluence, a quality Wiki.

One item to show is their component which lists all pages in a nice tree. The Ajax approach now means that ALL of the data doesn’t have to get loaded at once (which could grow to be very large). Only the high level nodes get loaded, and then ajax lazily loads any that the user actually navigates too.

This shows that Ajax can help with page loading, and server load, as well as UI items.

View the example of List Pages

And Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian has posted about various Ajax additions to Confluence, and more.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 1:35 am
11 Comments

4 rating from 6 votes

Thursday, April 14th, 2005

Drag n’ Drop in JavaScript

Category: JavaScript

A lot of people ask about drag and drop, and here is a nice set of examples: Direct Manipulation Using JavaScript and CSS.

Direct manipulation, particularly drag and drop, is under utilized in desktop applications and is almost non-existant in web applications. The following examples demonstrate that direct manipulation is possible in modern browsers.

Each example is a proof of concept. I’m answering the question Can I do this? without considering the question Should I do this?. That said, some of these examples are pretty impressive, so it’s nice to think that sometimes the answer will be Yes, you should.

Examples

• Basic Draggable Layers
• Drag & Drop Sortable Lists
• Edit in Place

You can then combine these JavaScript functions with Ajax to make sure that the changes you made are persisted!

Posted by Dion Almaer at 8:29 am
9 Comments

3.9 rating from 78 votes

Monday, April 11th, 2005

GreasemonkIE: JavaScript’s for both browsers

Category: JavaScript

GreaseMonkey is a very popular plugin for Mozilla, and now Todd has released a very early version of GreaseMonkIE.

Although some may poo-poo IE, we can’t forget its market-share, and from what I hear IE 7 is going to be pretty darn cool.

So, hopefully the monkIE will catch up to the monkey, and user scripts will rule ;)

Posted by Dion Almaer at 2:48 pm
1 Comment

3.5 rating from 2 votes

Ajax Wrapper for .NET

Category: .NET

Michael Schwarz has released a .NET Ajax wrapper DLL. The DLL itself is available for download, but the source code is not currently available.

You can take a peak at an example using C#, or VB.

Of course, ASP.NET has a bunch of Ajax support, which is enhanced in Whidbey. A lot of the components are Ajaxian, and are very, very cool.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 1:11 pm
4 Comments

2.7 rating from 6 votes

Tacos: Tapestry Ajax Components

Category: Ajax, Component

A new release of Tacos has been produced. Tacos contains Ajaxian components for the Java Web Framework Tapestry.

Typical Tree components exist, but what is more exciting is the fact that Partial components have been added. Take a look at the demo to see more.

As Matt Raible says:

Even better, these components work fine with JavaScript turned off. Well done Viktor! Too bad I can’t use Tapestry at my day job.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 11:06 am
3 Comments

3.7 rating from 55 votes

Monday, April 4th, 2005

ActiveWidgets Grid 1.0

Category: Component, JavaScript, Library, Toolkit

ActiveWidgets has released an updated Grid component: ActiveWidgets Grid 1.0.

The grid component is very clean and slick, and is only one of the many components in their UI toolkit.

ActiveWidgets products are available for both open source and commercial software development.

Here are the simple guidelines for choosing the right licensing option:

• Use the free version in open source software licensed under the GPL.
• Use the free version for testing and evaluation purposes.
• For all other uses you should purchase the commercial license.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 10:44 am
2 Comments

3.2 rating from 10 votes

SQL to query JavaScript? :)

Category: JavaScript

TrimPath has a new TrimQuery release which groks SQL:

With some inspiration from the JavaScript DB project, I’ve finally added a SQL parsing frontend to TrimQuery, release 1.0.28.

That is, the TrimQuery engine now supports SQL instead of just the TrimQuery Language (TQL).

You can take a look at the new demo page for a quick test drive http://trimpath.com/demos/test1/trimpath/query_demo.html

And, more TrimQuery information is available at http://trimpath.com/project/wiki/TrimQuery

Not quite sure how I feel about an SQL parser in JavaScript… but cool!

Posted by Dion Almaer at 10:37 am
8 Comments

2.5 rating from 4 votes

Friday, April 1st, 2005

You know you’re a Java weenie when…

Category: Java

1. Hani viciously biles you, and you publicly thank him for it, calling it “an honor”
2. You go to TheServerSide Java Symposium even though you talk about how much you hate TheServerSide.com. You then try to hide in sessions as you blog that you only go because you like Vegas
3. You feel the need to tell the whole world that Sun has rejected your JavaOne talk, and then further embarrass yourself by claiming its some sort of conspiracy
4. You think its great that we have 45 XML APIs and 938 Web frameworks, claiming that “choice is a good thing.”
5. You are excited about SQL AOP (and now SQXML AOP)
6. You complain that Maven is too complex and completely unusable, then gradually let it slip that you’ve never actually gone so far as to try it out before assailing it
7. You feel the need to blog every time you need a job or are offered a job
8. You go out and spend a small fortune on a 30″ Apple LCD and then rub it in everyone’s face… multiple times
9. You think that whoever doesn’t choose to waste their money on overpriced, underpowered Apple hardware couldn’t possibly have the critical thinking skills required to be a good software developer
10. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you turn around and tell people it completely sucks and they should have been using Ruby for the past few years
11. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you throw it all away to learn Objective-C and try to convince the world that managed code is just a fad and that platform marketshare really isn’t all that important anyway
12. You are mercilessly rude to Microsoft for years until they send you on an expensive and exclusive “summit”, after which you are all warm and cuddly with your new best friends in Redmond
13. You embarrass the entire Enterprise Java community by blogging about how neat it is that PHP wraps CGI state in variables (next blog: “Wow! Perl has this cool $_ variable!”)
14. You endorse Struts for years and then overnight change positions and start claiming that it’s a huge heaping pile of crap and taking irrational pleasure in bashing Craig McClanahan
15. You think naming client-side browser scripting after a cleaning agent will somehow change the hellish set of horrors that is dynamic HTML development ;-)

Happy April 1st — Dion and Ben

Posted by Ben Galbraith at 1:10 am
8 Comments

4.3 rating from 6 votes