Opera has announced a beta software development kit (SDK) for its mobile phone Web browser and user interface package, called Opera Platform.

I thought I was the only one seeing the benefit of using Ajax.

Full Article at News.com

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Dave over at ILoveJackDaniels.com has a nice cheat sheet in PDF and PNG format. Nice and wallet sized. Included, you’ll find a guide to the XMLHttpRequest object, functions and methods (from DOM and otherwise), some simple JavaScript, Regular Expressions and Events.

This has come in very handy to me personally, so I urge any serious web developer (except the experts, of course) to take a look at this and keep it close. Trust me, it is a real time saver.

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Brian Goldfarb, a Microsoft Product Manager, had an interview some days ago where he answered questions about the company’s plans with Ajax development tools. This is quite an interesting article. However, I love the way that Dion at Ajaxian.com summarized things summarizes things:

To some up:

• “Ajax is hard”
• “Microsoft invented Ajax”
• “Microsoft will make it easier”

This was basically what Brian Goldfarb seemed to have been getting to.

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Here’s a little intro what I’ve been working on at my Job for the past couple months.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML for web development. Basically you use a some JavaScript to get down below the browser level and control HTTP “GET”s and “POST”s and stuff like that. It’s used by stuff like Google Maps and Google Suggest and GMail. What it enables is basically background activity without the user’s knowledge. This means that you don’t have to do anything really for things to happen. No need for clicks or form submissions and most importantly, no need to reload the entire page when processing data. You can read more about it here.

Now how does this tie in with my job? For the past couple months I’ve been working at a company which runs a legacy program written in ANSI C. The task I’ve been assigned is to enable web access to this program from a normal web browser. On the server end we’re running FASTCGI. This enables a process (the program) to be constantly running while being accessed from the web. Normal CGI programs and PHP scripts are run only one time and then die. FASTCGI avoids that problem.

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I first came across AJAX at my job. I was trying to give an application some Web capabilities and I realized that the normal way the browser works was very limited. In an article at News.com, Martin LaMonica has also realized the limits we are at:

At the moment, Web pages are limited, compared with most desktop applications. AJAX frees Web pages from the clunkiness they suffer from by making them more interactive and so more functional, Web developers say.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In my current application, I’m soft of ignoring the XML portion, but the ability to request information Asynchronously from the server is an insane advantage. Google has been taking advantage of Ajax for a long while now. We see it in GMail and in Google Maps. You can tell when Ajax is at work because a key effect of Ajax is new browser requests without the browser refreshing, sometimes without the user’s knowledge. Take GMail for instance; your inbox is frequently refreshed in the background while the user is on the same page. Or Google Maps; when the user moves around on the map, new map data is requested on the fly. Lately Yahoo has also jumped on the Ajax train with their own map service. A webmessenging service called Meebo also uses Ajax beautifully. Ajax is the way of the future and I am very happy that I’m going to be part of that.

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