Safari: Browser.Back + Ajax
Matthias Willerich has written about hacks to get the back button working with Ajax land.
He likes to various work:
Any others out there?
Declarative Ajax
Duncan Cragg thinks that The Right Way to do Ajax is Declaratively:
Don’t write your interactive Web application in custom Javascript! The Web’s Declarative nature needn’t be broken just because you want two-way dynamic data instead of one-way documents on your site.
Instead, write Declaratively to generic Javascripts, plugins and browser features such as Hijax, hInclude, XForms, SVG, XBL, etc.
Duncan goes into details of declarative talks from XTech this year and his thoughts on where we should be going.
Is AJAX Accessibility a major issue?
With yet another perspective on the wealth of Ajax usability discussion flying around, Hari Gottipati shares his thoughts on his blog on XML.com. Specifically, he’s responding to the eWeek article posted a while back.
inally people realized the disadvantages of Ajax and they are trying to overcome them. The main disadvantage of Ajax is a Web page is not required to reload to change, many screen readers or other assistive technologies used by sight-impaired or otherwise disabled users may not be aware of the dynamic changes. Particularly this is the major hurdle for federal sector because all federal government web sites/applications has to meet the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Hari makes the comment that, in the eWeek article, they talk about using the Bindows framework to build compiant web applications, but that they don’t mention how (or what kind of result it will give). He also asks whether it is even possible to create a 100% compiant web application using Ajax in any framework.
If we fail to overcome this issue, we will see the Ajax implementations just to say “ooh look at me I’m web 2.0 too!” or to target the users who enabled JavaScript and using the particular versions of the browsers(by ignoring the blind people). Since majority of users has the latest browsers with Ajax/JavaScript support(90% of browsers have JavaScript enabled), do you think Accessibility is not going to be an issue?
Two Key Challenges for Ajax Adoption that We Have Ignored
In this new article over on the Ajax World Magazine site, Coach Wei talks about the two major hurdles that are really hindering Ajax’s widespread adoption in both the corporate and non-corporate worlds. He also wonders why no one’s doing anything about them…
There are some fairly big issues with Ajax and I am puzzled. I think the Ajax community need to pay more attention here in order for Ajax to be really adopted.
He goes for the positive before the negative, talking about his personal position on Ajax and general support of it. With his standards in place, he gets to the bad news - the two things no one really wants to talk about:
- 10% browsers have Javascript support turned off. It means that 10% users can not access Ajax-based web sites or applications. This is definitely a problem for Ajax.
- Taking the issue a little further, let’s talk about accessibility. […] Most Ajax applications use Ajax widgets that may or may not support accessibility.
He briefly describes each, but doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions to rid ourselves of these problems. Degradable javascript practices can handle some of the problems these two topics might cause, but accessibility is still an issue even then. Suggestions? Comments?
Web API authentication for mashups
Julien Couvreur has posted on an interesting topic he’s been working with lately (along with Jason Levitt) - API authentication for mashup applications, both Ajax-enabled and not.
Jason Levitt has been teasing me in our discussions on cross-domain requests about Yahoo’s upcoming authentication API. The recurring problem: how to offer web APIs that can be mashed up but involve personal data? You want to allow for a large number of third parties to integrate with your services, but don’t want phishing sites to abuse them.
He starts with a look at the technologies modern browsers offer to accomplish this authentication - the communication and authentication sides - before looking at the way Yahoo! chose to handle it, a browser-based authentication (bbauth) model. It works more like an authentication mechanism than an authorization method, but includes a capability-based security model to help limit things even further.
Julien continues on to describe more fully the implications of this method and why this could be a good thing for web services.
JBoss Seam knits AJAX and Java together
JBoss has joined in the AJAX game with the launch of an open-source framework for AJAX applications called Seam.
The framework, written in Java and released under the LGPL, is aimed at making developing interactive web applications easier by providing a standard set of UI widgets and back-end classes. The toolkit also contains components to make programming in a Web environment easier by taking care of session management and application workflow.
Several AJAX frameworks have been released recently, notably the Google Web Toolkit. However, as yet there’s little effort to produce a vendor-neutral standard for such frameworks in any language. Without a framework like Seam or GWT, you have to write your own client-side code and server-side components to support them. However, GWT isn’t entirely open source, containing one binary-only component.
uniAjax: an ajax framework focused on browser support
Andreas Kalsch wanted an Ajax framework that could run on nearly all of the browsers out there, so he created uniAjax.
Tactics for browser compatibility is dropping down to iframes as other frameworks do.
Example
Here is an example that makes a simple ajax request and shoves in the result to a div:
<script language="JavaScript"><!--
// create uniAjax object:
ajax = new uniAjax();
/* define function that receives the response of the Ajax request.
* parameters:
* - response: the returned string (must be param 1)
* - id: individual param that sets the id of the element that will contain the response
*/
takeResponse = function(response, id) {
if (typeof id != 'undefined')
document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = response;
}
//--></script>
<input type="button" value="Insert in div 1" onclick="ajax.request({'url': 'response.php', 'func': takeResponse}, 'content1');"/>
<input type="button" value="Insert in div 2" onclick="ajax.request({'url': 'response.php', 'func': takeResponse}, 'content2');"/>
<div id="content1"></div>
<div id="content2"></div>
// create uniAjax object:
ajax = new uniAjax();
/* define function that receives the response of the Ajax request.
* parameters:
* - response: the returned string (must be param 1)
* - id: individual param that sets the id of the element that will contain the response
*/
takeResponse = function(response, id) {
if (typeof id != 'undefined')
document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = response;
}
//--></script>
<input type="button" value="Insert in div 1" onclick="ajax.request({'url': 'response.php', 'func': takeResponse}, 'content1');"/>
<input type="button" value="Insert in div 2" onclick="ajax.request({'url': 'response.php', 'func': takeResponse}, 'content2');"/>
<div id="content1"></div>
<div id="content2"></div>
Eventsites – Proof Of Concept
Developer Pete Nixey created this site as a proof-of-concept. Eventsites is a full-fledged application that uses no server logic and stores no data of it’s own. We’ve all seen the Google map mashups, but this really takes things to the next level and shows the power of what can be created in today’s Web 2.0 environment.
This is a 1 page AJAX application that merely acts as a “client to other webservices”.
Visit Pete’s blog to find out how this was created.