Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

Okay, so I attempted to install Windows Vista in my VM (Virtual Machine) and had nothing but issue after issue. A friend of mine gave me a copy at Christmas and I am fairly certain it isn’t legit, but I thought I would at least give it a try for 30 days, or so I thought. It seems Vista had other ideas and did not want me to run it, so I say cool! I wasn’t all that enthused about using it anyways.

Anyways, I am sure there will be a day when I will have to use Vista, either at work or fixing someone else’s PC. But today was not the day and tomorrow isn’t looking good either. In fact, I highly doubt I will see myself installing Vista on a PC anytime soon.

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.

I am experimenting with my new theme, trying to get pieces of it just right, so if you have troubles reading it, please take a screenshot of it and link to it in a Comment. The header rotates between 5 different images at random, so you may see a different one every so often.

A little about the theme…
I built the theme based a bit off of K2, in that I included the code for the Sidebar Widgets. Other than that, it does not have anything else related to K2. Some of the plugins it uses are “Collapseable Categories”, “Bunny Tags”, “IG Syntax Hilite”, and “Sociable”. There are a few more Admin related plugins, but those have nothing to do with the theme.

Depending on my satisfaction with the remaining pieces I need to work out, I may allow the theme to be downloaded, but for now, its just going to sit here until I know all is well.