Entries Tagged 'PHP' ↓

I have settled on ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. Why you ask? Well for many reasons! One, it is written well. Lacks all the visual effects, but seriously, who needs those? It is fast, as it uses JSON, and that is a MAJOR surprise, as I figured M$ would be all over using XML. Secondly, if you pair it up with PHP for Microsoft AJAX it just flat out works nicely and costs little effort to write scripts for!

I wrote a few sample scripts using it in less than 5 minutes! 5 minutes!! I cannot stress that enough. I was amazed at the type of complexity I could write in just a few minutes of using it. Now, I am not a “big” M$ fan, but I am willing to give credit when due, and they deserve credit for this. I am truly pleased with the fact it works in Firefox, it works in IE, and it probably works in Opera (though I haven’t tested it). It has files for all languages, to handle currencies, dates, etc. Totally amazing.

I have so many plans on how to use this to perform more advance functionality in several of my applications and best of all, I didn’t have to write my own XmlHttpRequest methods.

I am searching for a good ajax library to use in several of my applications. I have heard about Prototype, Mootools, Dojo, etc but which one does the trick and does it well? I tried Dojo a while back and never really got the hang of its layout. Connecting events to the controls felt awkward and not very clear. I have seem demos of Prototype and Mootools, and though they look cool, I have not had any experience with them.

At work, I write my own Ajax utilities. Primarily because we run .NET v1.1, and it is just FREAKIN’ easy to serialize a class straight into XML than write methods to output JSON. So, if you didn’t figure it out yet, I wrote prototypes in JavaScript to read the XML and make useable objects in JavaScript that could easily be handled. This process seems to be a bit slow, and though its effective, its costly to wait 5 seconds for the process to finish.

So why don’t I just write my own for my upcoming applications? Well the difference is, the upcoming applications are in PHP. PHP does not have nice ways of serializing directly into XML, so that is less of a reason for continuing my current approach. Plus, with it taking 5 seconds to run, it kinda seems like its slow. I visit many sites whose Ajax runs much quicker than that.

So let’s hear it! Tell me which Ajax framework works best for you, what are its’ strengths, its’ weaknesses? Leave nothing to the imagination.

cpCommerce
I am not sure what put me in such a great mood Friday evening, but Friday evening I completed 10 known bugs in cpCommerce plus added a new feature. Then to top it off further, I modified my shell script that builds the SVN repository every Sunday morning so it would also build a “diff.patch” file describing the difference between the previous version and the newer version. Then on Sunday it was discovered that a bug dealing with the “discount” feature existed in always providing every customer with a 20% discount on their purchase. Within a few hours, that was fixed and the release file was rebuilt manually so everyone could download the new ZIP file.

kiosk
I also accomplished a lot in kiosk over the weekend too. Finalized some of the installation processes, and started working heavily on the modules in the Administration Control Panel. I also refined major parts of the framework to fit better with the overall goal of being a “plug-n-play template system.”

Linux
Finally, I have been spending my weekend trying to get my media center PC up and running again after a Ubuntu upgrade. Not sure what caused the FREAKIN’ issue, but I am not very appreciative about it. Overall, this is the first day I have tried to fix it since I discovered it being down on Saturday morning, so it might not really be a “major” issue.