techno.blog("Dion")

I am really excited about XmlHttpRequest being available in the major browsers.

One of the main reasons is that I think it really enables componentization.

Take the example of a portal, with 10 components on the screen. In the past the web application would have to round-trip to the server, and rerender everything. What a waste of time!

Now, with XHR, each component can talk back to the server if it needs too, and the rest of the page stays put.

Ok, more efficient, but is it that big a deal?

I think it is. The real power comes in when you think about having plugged in those 10 components from DIFFERENT SOURCES. That works just fine now, whereas it would be a real PITA as the portal software would have to coordinate everything in the past. Now, each component truly is its own component, and our clients talk directly to its server-side representation.

I expect to see a lot more ideas such as Y!Q, that make use of this.

I was impressed to see news.com using the referrer data (in this case, I was coming from Google) to enhance their interface:

Welcome, Google user!
If this story isn’t what you’re searching for, try these other News.com search results for “FOO”:

… insert other results …

This is a really smart use of context. In a stateless world such as the web, we often don’t know much. It is interesting to think about different ideas that we could put up based on where someone came from.

One crazy idea would be to get some general ‘poll’ data. E.g. imagine a political article. You could record how people came from the democratic undergroup, as compared to rush limbaughs site ;)

Rolling with Ruby on Rails is a new tutorial that goes through building a sample application from start (installing all software [rails, db, etc]) to finish (a running application).

Rails is really getting a lot of attention, and could be the tipping point for Ruby itself this year.

Parting Thoughts

Ruby on Rails has taken web application development to a whole new level. You no longer need to do the parts that used to be tedious work, because Rails does them for you. Even if you have to use a legacy database that does not use the Rails naming conventions, you don’t have to give up the productivity advantages of using Rails–there is still a way to tell Rails explicitly what table and column names to use.

Now that you’ve seen firsthand how easy it can be to create a web application, why would you want to do it any other way?

Perhaps your employer has mandated a particular framework or language. You can still take a few days to prototype it in Rails, then go to your boss and say, “I’ve already finished writing our entire application in Ruby on Rails! If you prefer, we can still take the next few months to write it as we originally planned.”

I talked about the lovely clean, responsive, UI of tadalist.com.

There is ONE tweak that would make me happy as a bunny. At the moment you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your ToDos. At the moment the RSS pings you with new additions, which is nice, but isn’t what I want.

I would like the RSS feed to come at me with the following everytime a ToDo list has been changed (new item, item marked as ‘done’, etc).

RSS for Todo List: Code Changes for X

TODO:
- Add method foo() to Bar
- Refactor FileParser
- Scrap whole thing for Rails implementation

DONE:
- Add method bar() to Bar

This would be great as then when I am offline, I will always have my current Todo’s in my RSS aggregator. When a new RSS entry comes in for a ToDo list, I would just nuke my last one.

OR, if the same GUID was used, it would just be replaced!

I found out about TaDaList.com from Jim Weirich:

I just came across this one today, and its the real reason I started this blog entry. Wow, what a simple idea. And so beautifully executed. Notice the lack of submit buttons. Just start typing todo list entries, hitting a return to go to the next one. Finished a todo item and want to check it off? Just check the box

I love the new rel=”nofollow” attribute that you can put into links now.

I am also amazed at how quick the attribute went from an idea to implemented in a lot of software!

The idea is that you can place a rel=”nofollow” attribute to a link. E.g. <a href=”http://to.some.site.com/foo” rel=”nofollow”>foo</a>

If a link has this attribute, the engines such as Google, Y!, MSN Search, etc know that the link isn’t ‘trusted’. This is particularly helpful in areas such as blogs when people can randomly write comments with URLs (unless they are stripped etc of course). No the blog software can always put in the new attribute and spammers won’t be able to bump their PageRank.

Although this is great to see, it would be nice to have a few more semantics (and have them defined in a small spec somewhere).

For example, maybe I want to say “I really like this site”, “I don’t really know about this site but don’t punish it”, “This site it totally untrusted”, etc.

I also don’t know about the value “nofollow”. How about “untrusted” or “trusted” or “super-duper-fan-baybee” :)

Wow. Laszlo Platform Goes Open Source.

This is really cool news, and is smart from Laszlo in my opinion. Before this they were competing with traditional app development, and more expensive frameworks such as Macromedia Flex.

Now that their platform is open source, many more people will take a look and find out how good the platform is.

It is interesting to watch companies make the move from:

“We provide commercial software. Pay us per seat”

to:

“The software is free. But we can help and add value that way”

I really hope Laszlo is successful. If you want to check out the wave of Rich Internet Applications give it a try.

Dynamator 1.5 has been released.

Dynamator is a simple tool that can be used with any page generation technology to completely separate HTML from server code. Dynamator transforms HTML or XML files into server pages or programs. It can generate JSP, XSL, Velocity, and even plain Java.

Dynamator 1.5 features major performance improvements, syntax validation, a documentation refresh, and a large number of minor enhancements and bug fixes.

It looks similar to XMLC. I am always a fan of technologies which leave the HTML as HTML. This way designers can dink around, viewing something that looks like the real thing without having to go through a round-trip.

Using the id=”x” approach definitely gives you this ability (like XMLC, and Tapestry with its jwcid=”x”).

It is also interesting that you can use Dynamator with many page generation technologies and it is “build-time”.

Mike has revamped the OpenSymphony website this weekend. Not only that, but a lot of new code is coming out of OS these days. OSCache 2.0, OSWorkFlow 2.5, and the rest of the gang are all coming with new releases. It is great to see these guys pushing on with quality components. I am always impressed with what they offer, and how othogonal the pieces are. Compare WebWork + Sitemesh to Struts + Tiles. Which one of those sets locks you in more? Keep up the great work.