No future for AJAX?

by Khaled on March 9th, 2007

Many predictions here and there all over the web are stating that we’re going towards a web that will be mostly based on RIAs. So of course the platforms technology for these RIAs is very important! Now we are talking a lot about AJAX… But I guess you all know it is not that easy to make it cross-platform… You will most probably develop it on one platform then go through a tweaking nightmare to make it behave the same way on all the platforms you’re targeting and all the browsers etc…Looking at what has always happened on the net I believe that the pressure on the major companies to improve their services and productivity will probably lead them to replace AJAX techniques to build richer Internet Applications faster and with nicer, better and easier development process than what is available now with the XMLHttpRequest stuff…
Flash/Flex would be a nice alternative, this makes sense in my opinion especially if you’ve heard about the new online version for Photoshop,seeing how this will look/behave will certainly give us a nice example to follow… as it always takes one big company to develop a valuable technique to make others adopt it (Youtube you say?). The only problem with flash/flex, In my opinion, in comparison with AJAX is that Flash/flex is designed, controlled and sourced by one single company… But then Java is widely used in programming despite the fact that it is proprietary and controlled by a single party…
On the other hand we have the open source OpenLaszlo platform that is written in XML and JavaScript and then compiled to Flash and DHTML, so it is a kind of advanced AJAX application platform and it looks promising as it offers a lot of possibilities…

The replacement for AJAX should be more responsive and more interactive, with a bigger penetration and ubiquity, with a better and nicer development experiences and processes, offers a java-like cross-platform development and with reasonable cost…

I am thinking this is happening quite soon!and as I’ve said before the release of the photoshop online version by Adobe (which was my starting point for all these thoughts) will give us a better idea about the future of RIAs…

May be you’re thinking it is too soon to discuss this… but who knows…

Can I always use a 100% AJAX Solution?

by Khaled on January 12th, 2007

Lately I have been discussing this matter with different people on some forums or in real life. The discussion was about whether it is wise to totally rely on AJAX to design a web site or a web application without introducing any alternative way of usage. Some guys were claiming that it is safe to do so as most of the internet users now have Javascript-capable browsers. I believe that the best practice for the moment is to build your accessible application then add AJAX to make it better.

In my Opinion it is totally wrong to consider that JavaScript is always available, as this not the case at all for the moment at least.

Some visitors are not using Javascript-capable browsers (yes, they might be a minority, but remember your site should be accessible to potentially everyone), sometimes they are behind a script blocking firewall so even if their browsers are JavaScript capable the script won’t work for them!
I’ve read some nice articles by Ian Lloyd on this matter and I believe they are really interesting:

- Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut: Ma.gnolia’s case.
- Blogger: Can I get in please?
- Bloglines is broken! (at least for me)

Those are articles exhibiting some accessibility errors made by some very known “guys” just because they are totally relying on JavaScript!
and they forgot that for some reason or another their Javascripts are not executed…

Roger Johansson sums up the whole issue in a very nice way!

FireBug 1.0 Beta released.

by Khaled on December 5th, 2006

As you all now I am a big fan of FireFox mainly because it is modern, standards compliant, and very extensible and useful for New Media developers and Web designers. One great Add-on for FireFox is FireBug.

FireBug is a noteworthy add-on for Mozilla FireFox, I’ve been using it since a couple of months now and I think it is an outstanding tool for web developers and programmers. Now that version 1.0 Beta was released it’s become a “must have” extension.

With FireBug you are able to inspect, modify, debug and edit CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of any page you want. Now you can open FireBug in its own separate window, you can change the CSS of your page and see it work immediately, the FireBug DOM inspector’s CSS tab displays all the CSS rules for all of the page elements, it even shows the inherited CSS properties. Moreover, if you have CSS boxes that are not lining up correctly you can use the rulers, the guides and the shaded boxes of the layout tab to inspect all the margins, borders, paddings… and this is really great and time saving.

The FireBug JavaScript debugger is very powerful, yet it is very handy and easy to use. With this debugger you can pause the execution of the script at any time in order to monitor what’s going on. On the other hand the FireBug JavaScript profiler is a wonderful tool to inspect performance, tweak it and catch bottlenecks.

All in all it is a wonderful plug-in for Firefox, that helps you to improve you productivity and your work flow, it reveals detailed reports about all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even XML errors. But the best thing is yet to come… FireBug is FREE!! Joe Hewitt, the man behind this fabulous bug, was thinking that the 1.0 release will be a commercial product, unlike the previous versions, but he finally dropped that idea and decided that the FireBug extension “will remain free and open source” and will be released under the same tri-license used by FireFox (MPL/GPL/LGPL).

Thanks Joe! If you like FireBug (I am sure you will) don’t forget to donate to the project to keep it running and alive. Go and Donate!

AjaxCore PHP Framework: interesting!

by Khaled on November 27th, 2006

I don’t exactly remember how I stumbled on this Framework…probably on the Ajax Magazine or was it Sitepoint first? I don’t remember! Anyway… AjaxCore is an Open Source multi-purpose PHP framework that will help you for sure with the creation of rich and advanced Ajax applications.

Ajax, if you don’t know it yet, is the acronym for: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It’s a new development technique that is tightly associated with the concept of Web 2.0, this Ajax technique is a kind of a mash-up mixing (X)HTML, JS, CSS, DOM and XML to create interactive and Rich Web applications.

In fact AjaxCore does all the JavaScript work and generates the appropriate code for you. AjaxCore uses Prototype’s JavaScript library to get Document Object Model elements and deal with asynchronous XMLHttpRequest. It is a very nice Ajax oriented framework that can be very helpful…Just give it a try!!

FreelanceDaddy

by Khaled on August 17th, 2006

So you are a full time or a part time freelancer? do you know FreelanceDaddy? If not you are missing something important. FreelanceDaddy is a Guide for freelancers especially those starting their career. More than 1000 projects posted on different freelance markets every day, you will find Graphic design projects, Programming (PHP, ASP, Ruby, .NET, Python, Perl, Java, Coldfusion, SQL…) Projects, Designing (HTML, CSS, Flash…) Projects and even SEO and Web promotion jobs.

Everything is well organized in tidy categories and the design is outstanding. It is a pleasure to visit and to use besides it is very helpful and time saving.

Just take a look! it won’t disappoint you
Go to FreelanceDaddy.

Software Programming Process

by Khaled on July 13th, 2006

This kind of things are more and more commun!

Django Django Django!

by Khaled on July 7th, 2006

Yes, Django! I am speaking about the Python framework! I am starting to mess with it, to test it and I am liking it! I have some projects on my head and I feel like Django is going to be a key tool in some of them! I am running on Linux (with Python 2.4.3), the installation was really smooth, I like that. For the database I started with MySQL but finally shifted to PostgreSQL which is the recommanded DB for Django. I am not a very good programmer nor I am a big fan of that but I really like the Django models and templates and enjoy them! I love it!
The Django Project