Category Archives: AJAX

A Curmudgeon We All Can Love

Douglas Crockford, purveyor of the JSONRequest spec, is cranky in a polite sort of way. He also happens to be right! Check out the video of his recent talk on The State of AJAX. Crockford takes us through a brief … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, CSS, One Step Forward, Web as Platform | Leave a comment

Agnostic Unobtrusive JavaScript

A few weeks ago I wrote about Unobtrusive JavaScript using the Prototype versus JQuery stacks. In that post I came down on the side of the JQuery stack. Something I didn’t analyze at the time, was: is it possible to … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, RJS templates, Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments

UJS; RJS versus POJS; Prototype Stack versus JQuery Stack

I am accustomed to using Unobtrusive JavaScript (UJS) in my apps. UJS dynamically adds event handlers to the DOM. These event handers implement behaviors via DOM manipulations and XMLHttpRequests (XHR’s). This approach is in contrast to the historical approach of … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, RJS templates, Ruby on Rails, script.aculo.us | 4 Comments

ID Proliferation Eradication Technique #1: Leverage page.select with page.insert

update 3/29/2009 8:34 AM: In November, 2007 Brad Wilson pointed out an even cleaner fix. Rather than relying on page.select you can just use page.literal to inject (literal) JavaScript code right where you want it. So recasting my example using … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, CSS, RJS templates, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment

Fight id Proliferation and Update Any Element You Want

update: July 5, 2007: see ID Proliferation Eradication Technique #1… for an update. The Prototype Updater constructor takes an Element (object) or element id (String) as the first parameter. You can see this in prototype.js in Abstract.Insertion.initialize and Ajax.Updater.updateContent . … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, Ruby on Rails, script.aculo.us | 6 Comments

Rails IDE Goes Jurassic

About a year ago in Smalltalk Browser Goes Jurassic I lamented the fact that the Smalltalk browser UI was caught in a techno-aesthetic time warp and cheered the possibility that it might escape to the future and in doing so … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, One Step Forward, Ruby on Rails, Seaside, Smalltalk, Squeak, usability, Web as Platform | 1 Comment

Foolproof AJAX Progress Indicator

Bruce Williams is right on in Avoiding AJAX Faux Pas where he lists four inviolable conditions your AJAX code must meet. The first two conditions address the need to show (then hide) a visual progress indicator to let the user … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, RJS templates, Ruby on Rails, script.aculo.us | 2 Comments

JavaScript-Ruby Convergence

You may have noticed that the latest release of Firefox (2.0) supports JavaScript 1.7.  I was curious about just what the new JavaScript features were so I did a little poking around.  It turns out that if you peel back … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, Web as Platform | Leave a comment

Tell TextMate About Your RJS Templates

As explanations go, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than Cody Fauser’s excellent post on Rails RJS Templates. When you try it out though, you may notice that TextMate doesn’t know that RJS templates which by convention have an “.rjs” … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, RJS templates, Ruby on Rails, TextMate | 3 Comments

script.aculo.us InPlaceEditor Drops Paragraph Tags

I submitted a Rails/script.aculo.us defect describing how Ajax.InPlaceEditor is stripping paragraph tags when loading the textfield/textarea. While waiting for the Universe to respond, I’ve had some time to research the issue a little more. Interestingly, the behavior seems to have … Continue reading

Posted in AJAX, Ruby on Rails, script.aculo.us | Leave a comment