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.

Yesterday, I was browsing through digg.com programming channel. Mmm.. Impressive, more than half of the stories are related to ajax. So, I decided to write about bit of ajax today.

The main advantage of AJAX is that it works like a desktop application; instead of refreshing the page every time you change something, you can interact with the server then and there. When we talk about the disadvantages, there are a lot; bookmarks, back button, search engine incompatibility, etc (there are hundreds of articles in the internet regarding these.. so, I’m not going to repeat those ). But use of some hacks will help you to avoid those problems.

There are plenty of AJAX frameworks, both client side and the server side ones. I have gone through many of them and found out that one of the bests is rico. This simple javascript client side framework also contains some animation effects and drag and drop feature.

If you had a careful look at the popular javascript frameworks, you’ll see that most of them are based on prototype. Prototype is a really powerful javascript framework which allows you to create classes.

When we consider about the server side languages, using php is really easy. It’s a simple light weighted language and php applications can be executed in almost any web server (of course only if it supports php).

So, this great combination of tools will make you ajax life easier; prototype, rico and php.

P.S. : As I have mentioned in an earlier post, firebug will help you a lot on debugging.

After successfully finished an AJAX project (a simple AJAX Content Management System), this time I’m going to create a complete AJAX site. The CMS was created without using any 3rd party frameworks, and had a great time debugging the javascript code. So, this time I decided to use a framework.My choice was Rico – A client side javascript framework. It also provides some javascript animations and drag n drop features – haven’t tried those yet. Actually, this made my work much easier. If I want to update the value of an element, then I just have to create a piece of xml code, the framework parses it and updates the element automatically. But it only supports updating an element value, if I’m doing something outside that, I have to parse the code manually and do it. So, I created my own mini framework using Rico:). Now, it’s really easy.

When I was creating the CMS, the alerts did a great job ;). It really helped me to debug the javascript code. But this time, Rico blog directed me to a nice extension for firefox – FireBug. It’s really cool. Actually, the main advantage is, it captures all AJAX events. Simple and Useful.

Google Maps - That’s one of the most useful resources in the web. And a good usage of AJAX. Now, microsoft live team has turn into it; Live Local.

When I first saw the site… mmm.. it’s interesting - focused into colombo. ZOOM IN.. ZOOM IN… I was thinking like… ok. no more than that.. No. It’s going going.. WOW! Yeah! really. Then I realized that they are just rendering a zoomed version of earier images once after you reached level. Since, these are not real images, unlike in google maps, you can easily (err.. i didn’t really mean it.) do it.

Well, they have a traffic detials which is working and not going to work in Sri Lanka for at least for next few more years and a driving directions feature. I though that it’ll give the same result saying that this service not enabled in your area. No.. It’s not.. they are providing it. Well, it’s not realistic. They are just running something like dijktra’s algo and displaying the result, but with traffic detials and so on, I guess it’ll be really cool on some other countries.

I was thinking like, if **someone** can start an open source mapping service like this, so that anyone can enter detials here and there, I mean people can add data into the map such as roads, etc; then it’ll be really cool.

I have been working in web development for last few years, and HTML for lots of years. When I was learning HTML, one of the most powerful hacks used was Tables. Yes, using tables for layout is the most widely used hack in the Web. So do I. I was living happily with the tables. And also when it comes to development, the usage of tables made the life much easier; the repetition of the rows and columns; wow! That’s wonderful; err.. I mean easy

That’s the era of tables; and of course I used CSS here and there.. but not widely. I never thought of a pure CSS design. However, things have changed a lot since then. I started to redesign the whole web. I mean my webs. I started from my unpublished homepage (still it’s in my hard drive ) and did much more. (Take a look at the ihub - it’s the final outcome of our internet programming coursework; the objective was to create a simple site; so, we used CSS to keep it simple ;-))

Many of my friends started to ask; why CSS?? What’s the advantage? hmmm.. well! There are some, and of course some disadvantages are well. You have much more power in CSS than tables. You can do whatever you want; play with layers, transparency, absolute positioning for drag n drop. And if you are doing an AJAX application, you have more control in a CSS based design. After you designed everything, what if you are not happy with the font sizes? Simple, just change the style sheet :-). However, there is a big disadvantage; you have to worry about the browser compatibility. Difference between the views from the different browsers cannot be ignored. As you know for almost every (I don’t just say every - almost every) question there is an answer; here comes another question - how do I find the answer? refer to the internet :-). You can always use CSS hacks to keep compatibility.

AJAX - Now it had been there in the internet for few years, and big companies in the world are moving into it. AJAX came so popular after google released their AJAX based email service, gmail. So, now people have done a lot of projects with AJAX, and a lot of cool services are on their way.

While I was hunting for new AJAX tools, I was redirected to google suggest site. It seems like really nice. When someone is typing something, it suggests words and the nice thing is infront of the word, it displays the number of results.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en