AJAX Client Engine (ACE) – Problems

Ajax, Work

I found this link somewhere, I can’t remember where. But Li Shen has packaged a nice AJAX wrapper called AJAX Client Engine (ACE). I downloaded it and took a look at it and I must say, it is quite functional. I took a look at his source code and found it to be relatively clean. It’s not too bulky making it a nice thin wrapper and he made it very object oriented. Here are a list of the properties. Visit the site to find one more about each of these:

  • Object-oriented API.
  • Cross-browser support.
  • Request options.
  • Request parameter validation.
  • Callback arguments
  • Callback options.
  • Tracing service.
  • Caching service.
  • Polling service.
  • Common callbacks.
  • Exception handling.

There are some things I just love about this client. The tracing service: When this is enabled, a text area element in a new window (or in the same window if specified) is opened up and a debug is written. Basically, it tells you everything the AJAX client is doing. You can just insert the “trace” function call at various places where you need to debug information like when a request it made, when the AJAX states change, when a call is completed, etc. I must say, it is a very effective tool, one I should have come up with myself.

The polling service is a nice one. He has a built in cancel event when polling is done.

I just have one major problem with this wrapper. Firefox 1.07 under Linux, Fedora Core bugs a lot. Even with the examples located on Li Shen’s website, the browser crashes when using the polling option with a time less than 1 second. It starts out alright, then system resources quickly skyrocket until the browser crashes. I have no idea what is going on here. In the Mozilla based Konquorer, the script works fine. I’m guessing this is a problem with Firefox. Funny thing is this does not occur in Windows. Does this mean that AJAX doesn’t quite work in Firefox under Linux? Could be. This is a serious problem for me, since Firefox under Fedora Core 4 is my main working platform.

If anyone of you all have had similar problems with frequent AJAX calls to the server from Firefox under Linux, I would love to hear how you fixed things.