10 Practical Uses For AJAX

The article from noupe.com provides the reader with 10 useful and practical ideas for using AJAX (don’t know what’s that yet?) After the “Ajaxian Revolution”, many sites started to AJAX almost without thinking. They were trying to squeeze AJAX into whatever they think was possible. This lead to memory leaks, security holes, and made them look like ***holes (even though I censored my badmouth, people can still get what I am saying. See RIAA and the homeez, you can NEVER censor the Internet!). So here are the 10 practical uses for AJAX:

1. Login Forms
2. Auto-Complete
3. Voting and Rating
4. Updating With User Content
5. Form Submission & Validation
6. Chat Rooms And Instant Messaging
7. Slicker UIs
8. External Widgets
9. Lightboxes instead of pop-ups
10. Using AJAX With Flash

I was just thinking…the #10 usage seems pretty cool. We all know how Flash revolutionized the Internet and we also know how AJAX is revolutionizing the web today, and now if you think about mashing up these two mammoths of web, you can create a monolith!

Source: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/how-ajax-works.html

PHP, JSON and JavaScript usage

Source: http://ditio.net/2008/07/17/php-json-and-javascript-usage/

Today i want to introduce you to jSON (JavaScript Object Notation), in short, it is a simple format designed to exchange data between different programming languages. I will show you how to create JavaScript object, convert it to JSON string, and send to PHP script, which will decode jSON string to readable format (for PHP). But that’s not all, PHP script will create it’s own data object encode it to jSON string and send it back. All communication between JavaScript and PHP will be done thru AJAX.

AJAX Lessons – ajaxlessons.com

Source: http://www.ajaxlessons.com

I saw this site while I was in the hunt for creating a live AJAX page. That is, a page where it gets updated “asynchronously” by user data. The site has different workshops for AJAX applications and I found what I was looking for. Click here to see the tutorial.

Other than that, it lists many interesting tutorials including Max Kiesler’s collection of AJAX tutorials.

Content visualization techniques and views

Original Source: http://www.noupe.com/javascript/10-smart-javascript-techniques-for-manipulating-content.html

1. jQuery pageSlide: jQuery pageSlide is a plugin for jQuery that slides the viewable webpage off-screen, revealing and populating a secondary interaction pane. It may be used in a similar manner to Lightbox, where screen real estate and centralization of the user experience are a concern.
2. Create a simple ul list with a nice slide-out effect for li elements: We want to obtain this effect: when an user clicks on a link (”Hide”), the related
   element disappear with a nice animated slide out effect. A simple way to implement an animated “disappear” effect using MooTools slideOut()
3. Portfolio Layout Idea Using jQuery: Benjamin Sterling created an interesting portfolio layout and added a nice easing method to the main content panel using easeOutQuad and easeInQuad using jQuery easing plugin.
4. Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider: Niall Doherty’s Coda Slider inspired lot of designers and got them started quickly designing around it. Chris Coyier created a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider using Coda Slider plugin pretty much “out of the box” and added to it.
5. Easy Image or Content Slider: Easy Slider enables images or any content to slide horizontally or vertically on click. It is configurable with css alone.
6. mooSlide: mooSlide is nice replacement of the common “lightbox” module. It has some interesting options to influence the look and behaviour of the sliding box.
7. jQuery.SerialScroll: jQuery.SerialScroll allows you to easily animate any series of elements, by sequentially scrolling them.
8. Agile Carousel: Agile Carousel allows you to easily create a custom carousel.
9. Animated JavaScript Slideshow: This extremely lightweight JavaScript animated slideshow script includes a number of cool features to to style your content: description support, link support, no naming restrictions, portrait image support, graceful degradation and active thumbnail status.
10. Sexy Lightbox 2: Sexy Lightbox 2 is a sexier and lighter clone of the classic Lightbox. Supports displaying images and HTML elements.
11. UI.Layout: Was was inspired by the extJS border-layout. The UI.Layout plug-in can create any UI look you want – from simple headers or sidebars, to a complex application with toolbars, menus, help-panels, status bars, sub-forms, etc.

6 New AJAX and JavaScript Calendars and Timelines

This is a nice post by Paul Spoerry of http://www.paulspoerry.com that lists six highly efficient and unobtrusive JavaScript Calendars and Timelines.

Source: http://www.paulspoerry.com/2009/03/09/6-new-ajax-and-javascript-calendars-and-timelines/

MIT Simile Timeline Project

Screenshot of the Simile TimelineCalendars and Timelines seem to be sprouting all over the net these days. And they should be. Calendars are becoming more common as a household item for selecting dates. Timelines show the user information in an organized way that lets the user drag the change the date and time with convenience. If you want to see a really slick JS Timeline script, look at this: http://www.simile-widgets.org. These are applications made by MIT Simile Project to enhance the web with existing technologies.

Source (Timeline): http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/

Using Google AJAX Libraries API

Google’s AJAX Libraries API provides an easy and swift way for including the popular JavaScript libraries in dynamic websites. Usually, we send the required JavaScript libraries from our server to the user. This will take varying amounts of time if the website is accessed from different parts of the world. And if caching is not taken care by the programmer we would be sending the same file over and over again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could provide the libraries from a place closer to the user? thats exactly what Google AJAX Libraries API does – Acquestech

Source: http://www.acquestech.com/2009/01/google-ajax-libraries-api/