Thoughts of a coder

It’s how I think! It’s how I code!

Archive for category Ajax

Fire(bug)

Oct 23

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Ajax, Javascript | 1 Comment

Note : Before you read this blog post, if you are a web developer/designer and you have never tried firebug, then stop all your work and try that.

As you might already know, the best tool to debug a web frontend is firebug. It’s really easy and efficient. When you get used to it, you can’t actually live without it.

I was working on a web project for several months now, and there was a very strange behavior on that site. Everytime I go there, firebug stops working. That’s very annoying specially when that site is AJAX (and when there are lot of bugs there ;) ).

Today, I found what makes firebug stop. I was using “parent” as a variable name. The site works perfectly with it but firebug didn’t manage to handle that.

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P2P Minds

Apr 30

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Ajax, Internet, PHP, Web 2.0 | No Comments

We have just finished a small project – p2p mind.. We’ll probably release the code as GPL, even though it might not be useful for many of you ;-)

check this out : http://www.sandaru1.com/p2pmind/

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IE String arrays

Jan 29

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Ajax, Javascript, Programming | No Comments

I was doing a japanese shopping site and coded a small escape function in javascript which is also works for shift-jis encoding. The native function screws up the encoding. It worked prefectly, and I went on coding. I was doing all the development in firefox and suddendly the login function stopped working in IE(Actually not stopped working, It never worked in IE). The problem was that I used the javascript string as an array of char but in IE, it doesn’t support that. If I want to access a character I have to use the charAt function. When I searched in the Internet, I found that this is so common but just blogged it anyway.

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Web 2.0 is not AJAX

Nov 25

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Ajax, Web 2.0 | No Comments

AJAX was becoming popular for last few years. With the word ‘AJAX’ another simple word came into play ‘Web 2.0’. Some of us have been thinking that Web 2.0 is just using AJAX in a site which is not so true. AJAX may be a key element of web 2.0 but not the basic concept. The basic idea of web 2.0 is “the content of the site is decided by its users”. AJAX and CSS is used to create a simple interface. With the use of AJAX, a user can do many things without refreshing the same page like a desktop application.

As you all know quite good examples (best known as web 2.0 winners) for web 2.0 are digg, flickr, del.icio.us, youtube. These sites are really popular, have a great amount of users everyday, and new content arrives in each minute. Of course the secrete is web 2.0, the content is decided by the users.

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An AJAX mistake

Oct 22

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Ajax, Programming, Web 2.0 | No Comments

Yesterday (Saturday) I was running the IOI grader on university of moratuwa for their ACM selection tests. As far as the grader functionality is concerned, it worked perfectly. But unfortunately the grader interface was damn slow. There were only 26 contestants and it was on a 100 Mbps LAN. So, I had to restart the server time by time. So, I just looked at the log files and found out there was a huge number of requests. But why is that? Because our grader is using AJAX to grab the latest status. The AJAX script was generating a request for each 2-3 seconds. To make the things worst, those were keep-alive requests. So, not only that the server was using the maximum number of threads, the script keeps sending the requests to the same connection so the connection doesn’t break until it meets the maximum number of keep alive requests. When several guys are sending requests others have to wait in the queue. I simply changed the refresh time of the AJAX script and the number of maximum threads on the apache server. After that restarting the apache server solved the problem, more or less.

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