In February of 2006, we should expect the release of a new Joomla Book entitled Building Websites with Joomla!. I’m curious to see how much they pack into this one.

There is another book by the same author, Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial, which left much to be desired for me. If you’re looking for a quick, light, step by step procedure manual then I guess this will be enough for you. But if you’re looking for anything other than how to navigate through some of the menus you need to look somewhere else. This basically packages a small among for Mambo’s online documentation and sticks it in a paper back. But it is interesting to see anything about this CMS being published.

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With the way that Ajax applications have been developing, the questions of whether these applications can completely replace PC software comes to mind. Take Writely (online word processor) for instance:

”People are e-mailing document attachments in order to collaborate or else, in the enterprise world, they are attempting to use wildly expensive and complicated systems — the equivalent of trying to pound in a nail with a sledgehammer,” says Jen Mazzon, Writely’s vice president of marketing.

Her company’s service simplifies this ”by keeping track of a full revision history that includes who made what changes when, as well as by signaling to you who is co-editing with you at any given moment,” she says. ”Lastly, you can keep track of key changes made to the doc without even being in the doc, via an RSS feed that we enable.”

However, when implementing Ajax, developers need to understand it’s limitations. Bottom line is that Ajax is simply JavaScript and JavaScript performs horrible with large files. It all boils down to being just another script running from a browser. There is no way an application writing with a scripting language is going to effectively compete with one that is compiled.

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A new Joomla user over at Soho Cascade seems to be having a bad first impression of the Joomla CMS.

Basically, he’s been having some problems with the templates:

I sent an email to this company wondering what the problem might be and asking for a refund of my $50 subscription if the template required a lot of configuration, which I can’t do yet. In return I got a rude little email detailing the points of their terms and conditions.

I hate to hear these sorts of horror stories. It really does pain me, because Joomla is an incredible CMS with a wealth of power at your finger tips. Just as long as you follow a few basic rules, you’ll be fine. I’m not saying that Joomla does not have a significant learning curve; it does. But once you’re over that hump, it’s all down hill from there.

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I came across an interesting article at CRM News that spoke a little’ bit about online shopping for this upcoming Christmas season.

RIAs are beginning to pop up all over the e-commerce world, with some notable examples being Gap, Nike (NYSE: NKE), and L.L. Bean. So far the use of AJAX and RIA in online retail tends to be limited to marketing “microsites,” usually built in Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR), which enable customers to explore a new product but not purchase it; and also for “guided selling” applications that provide some extra help in choosing the right product. But as the technologies have been maturing, a new generation of software vendors have emerged that specialize in building “Rich Internet Commerce” applications — RIA and AJAX applications specifically for the e-commerce world — which are beginning to paint a picture of what the future pageless Web may look like.

This article poses some questions:

1. How many companies are going to try to utilise and/or exploit Ajax on their shopping sites?
2. Are they going to do an effective job?
3. Will it meaningful and help customer experience or just bells and whistles?
4. Is the average consumer even ready for “all the hype”?

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I believe that I now need to rethink the Ajax sequence on the project I am working on for work. As it stands, I had to do some interesting tinkering to make things work and emulate the console side properly. A normal sequence of GETs and POSTs would have been sufficient, except I needed something to handle server pushes. In the console application, there are some instances like popup boxes. Eg. After the client sends a request to the server, the server sends back a simple popup box, sorting. After it is done sorting, the server sends back the information to the browser. And this is the problem. Normally, Ajax does not handle this. This is where I had to implement a modified polling technique.

Basically, the client makes constant requests to the server. Yes, yes, I know that this is very inefficient, but this is a rough draft. Well, rough working draft. The server sends back a NULL flag, which the browser reads and ignores, or it sends back the requested data. This works, but is very inefficient. Normally, server initiated Ajax routines use a polling technique. This involves the client basically pinging the server on regular intervals to request data. I’m doing the same thing but without the time delay.

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Alex Bosworth over at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog wrote up a nice synopsis on 10 Places you should use Ajax. There is the basic list:

Form driven interaction.
Alex claims that forms are slow and clunky. I agree to a certain extent that Ajax can be used effectively here, but we must remember to make things painfully clear to the user. If a form looks like a form the user is going to expect it to operate like like a form. If you plan on doing something more with a form make it simple and extremely useful.

Deep hierarchical tree navigation.
In my opinion, tree navigations should be kept small anyway, but if you must have it then Ajax can make life easier. This is a perfect application of Ajax, actually. Ordinarily, the page would have to load the entire tree data regardless of what has been expanded or not. With Ajax, one does not need to request deeper tree data unless needed by the user. Alex states a prime example of threads in discussion forums.

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Ok, Firefox 1.5 was finally released today from Mozilla. Um, I must say that I’m not really impressed. Well, given the types of updates that were made, most people won’t notice a huge difference. There is added support for all sorts of things like SVG, CSS 2, CSS 2, and CSS 3, however most current sites don’t make heavy use of these so we won’t be noticing anything for a while. The Forward and Back buttons have been tweaked for greater response. I personally have not noticed much of a difference. I just hope the thing doesn’t crash like 1.07.

Tabs can not be repositioned by dragging and dropping, with no need for an external extension. Tons of security fixes have been added, which we won’t notice. That is actually a good thing. I feel that they kind of messed up the options interface. It’s all horizontal now. It’s just going to take some time to get used to. There is an auto update feature for updating extensions, themes, and the browser. What’s deferent you ask? It can be set to fully automatic: just download the updates and install whenever available. And the browser update is an actual update as apposed to the “Download the entire Firefox Installation and reinstall”.

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