Get Into This

This is just pretty damn cool. The boys (and/or girls) over at MidnightCoders.net have put together a AJAX powered chat room that displays the location of the user in the world using Google Maps (click on a room to chat in that room.)

This example demonstrates bi-directional messaging between heterogeneous (Flash and AJAX) clients and WebORB Message Server. The server performs additional processing to geolocate chat users, injects necessary information in messages so users can plotted on the map.

In an active chat room, it can get a little annoying, but I think it's pretty cool nonetheless. Perhaps if the map was zoomed out a little more so that it wouldn't jump around so much. It's kinda cool to see where everyone is chatting from.

[via Ajaxian]

• AJAX Frameworks - The folks over at AjaxPatterns.org have been putting together a list of all the known Ajax frameworks. I didn't know there were so many of them and the list is growing. If you know of any which aren't on the list (or are creating one yourself), either just edit the Wiki and add it or contact the site to have them add it.
• qooxdoo - I have no idea what the title means or even how to pronounce it, but I am very impressed at what it can do. As quoted from the website:
  

  qooxdoo is an advanced open-source javascript based toolkit. qooxdoo continues where simple HTML is not enough anymore. This way qooxdoo can help you to get your rich web application interface done - easier than ever before. Read more...

  If you've ever seen Bindows, qooxoo is very similar to that. You should definitely check out the demos to get a better feel of what can be done with this thing. Very impressive.

• Rico - Rico is a javascript library packed with some very nice features:
  • AJAX SUPPORT
  • DRAG AND DROP
  • CINEMATIC EFFECTS
  • BEHAVIORS

  Rico uses the Prototype library to do most of its cinematic effects. Now if only the developers of Rico, Prototype and Effects V2 would combine their efforts and put together a really nice framework. Even if they don't, each library can be used independantly or together to create some very rich internet applications. Nice.

Just wanted to post this link before I left for California and my 5 day vacation (woohoo!) I haven't forgotten about my two part Leaflink series and will get back to that when I return.

This is a Greasemonkey script that I found online that allows you to see the data being sent back and forth between your browser and the server on Ajax calls. The output is displayed in the javascript console. I think this is a great extension to have if you are doing any Ajax work. Check it out.

http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000250.html

Output of the script run against google suggest:

[via: ajaxian]

One of the shortcomings of Ajax/Remote Scripting is the fact that it practically renders the browsers Back and Forward buttons useless. This is because the request and response are made using javascript and the browser fails to acknowledge this as a regular request (how could it, the url never changed?).

Perhaps in future browsers, when an Ajax request is made, the browser will keep in its memory the current state of the DOM and return to this state when the back button is pressed. Until we have such functionality in the browser, we can use the Dojo Toolkit to mimic this behavior.

The Dojo toolkit's bind() command is a wrapper around the regular old xmlhttprequest object. The difference is that Dojo's implementation allows you to define what happens when the user hits the Back and Forward buttons. They accomplish this by capturing the event and firing any defined javascript method.

So for example, if you have a ajax call that reads some data from the server and populates a table, using dojo, you can define the back button to call another javascript function called resetTable() or clearTable(), which would just clear the contents of the table.

Here is a code snippet from the article on the bind() method:

var sampleFormNode = document.getElementById("formToSubmit");<br /> dojo.io.bind({<br /> url: "http://foo.bar.com/sampleData.js",<br /> load: function(type, evaldObj){<br /> // hide the form when we hear back that it submitted successfully<br /> sampleFormNode.style.display = "none";<br /> },<br /> backButton: function(){<br /> // ...and then when the user hits "back", re-show the form<br /> sampleFormNode.style.display = "";<br /> },<br /> forwardButton: function(){<br /> // and if they hit "forward" before making another request, this<br /> // happens:<br /> sampleFormNode.style.display = "none"; // we don't re-submit<br /> },<br /> formNode: sampleFormNode<br /> });

Yeah, its that simple. The article also talks about bookmarking the different "states" of your ajax page. Definitely an interesting article and approach to solving some of the ajax problems.

With the release of Ruby on Rails 0.11.1, the creators added some cool Ajax capabilities. This allowed you to do server side calls without having to refresh the whole page. The nice part about the Rails implementation is that you don't need to really understand how it works or know javascript too well. It's built into the framework, so just call the Ajax methods like you would any other Rails methods.

Well, with the next release of Rails we should be seeing some other pretty cool javascript/client-side effects. The new effects will range from scaling and shrinking to fading in and out of just about any element on your page. To see these features in action, go to the demo page:

http://mir.aculo.us/demos/effects/demo1.html