Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

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.

As a programmer/software developer, there are days that are just mentally exhausting. Today was one of those days for me. I have been working on a bridge to allow two systems to easily communicate with each other for the past month (really, i should say, I have been working on it off and on, you know how priorities go…).

The bridge is fairly straight-forward, if you completely know the products you are bridging together. However, I had to bridge eight different applications with another outside (as in, outside our network) application. Three of the applications I know very well, as I played a significant role in their development. One of them I knew fairly well and could easily figure out as it was written in an old language our company used that mimics JavaScript. Three of them, of which I have had no interaction with were also written in the older language, and so I figured them out, but it took more work than the prior applications. Finally, the last one I have hardly had any interaction with and it is in .NET… yet it is the one that has been giving me troubles for the past week.

.NET is easy and overly complicated at the same time. Poorly designed code can quickly confuse even the best of minds. Then add on code that is written in the application but never physically used, just adds on to the complication and torments the developer trying to learn how this program works. That was today in a nutshell. Code found in one place that looks exactly like what you wanted to see, ends up never being used throughout the rest of the application for unknown reasons and to top it off, when you ask the developers who work in it on a daily basis, they too have no idea why that code exists.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to bash the previous developers who wrote this mysterious code, but to give myself a mental note. Remove code that is no longer used from the project as soon as it makes sense to do so. Leaving it behind will only lead to greater complexity and much more confused looks on future developer faces. None of that is necessary and I for one do not want to me the reason for their headaches or confusing moments.

On the plus side of things, I got my issue worked out with the bridge and only have five more pieces to get the communication working smoothly. Plus, after racking my brain for several hours today sorting out the complexities and the confusing code, it is just FANTASTIC to see the part work right before my eyes so I know I figured it out entirely.