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Build an RSS Feed Reader using Ajax and PHP

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Programming, Ajax, PHP — Chris Cornutt at 9:56 am on Wednesday, August 2, 2006

ScratchProjects.com has posted both Part one and Part two in a new tutorial series, this time with a focus on creating a RSS feed reader by combining PHP and Ajax.

In Part one they lay the foundation, explaining how the tutorial will work, what the parts are, and what the parts do. Then, it’s on to the code, showing first how to fetch and parse the remote feeds and create the DIV the results will be dropped into.

Part two takes the next steps and creates the form to add a feed to be parsed, the functionality to insert it and its information into the database, and to grab the list of feeds from the database and read in the contents.

It’s a pretty basic tutorial, but great for those just starting out with this handy, powerful functionality. It requires a bit of knowledge about PHP, but most of the code needed is spelled out for you. Plus, you can download the code as well.

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A Primer on Microsoft Atlas

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Tutorial, Atlas — Chris Cornutt at 8:34 am on Wednesday, August 2, 2006

So you’ve been reading up on the boatload of Ajax solutions out there and, with the countless number, it hard to keep track sometimes. A little while back, Microsoft tossed their own hat into the ring with Atlas, an offering to make life easier for ASP.NET users to get in on the Ajax fun. But where to start learning about this new technology? Well, this new article from the Ajax Developers Journal guides you through everything you’ll need to get started.

Iimplementing AJAX may not be easy since it involves writing a lot of code in a client-side scripting language like JavaScript and any developer who has worked with one would attest to the fact that developing and debugging complicated client scripts can sometimes be daunting. It can be even more daunting to maintain Web applications where the logic is interspersed between client and server code.

The Atlas framework from Microsoft promises to fill this gap and make it easier for the ASP.NET developer to easily develop interactive AJAX-enabled applications. In this article we’ll look at what ATLAS is and focus on the server controls that an ASP.NET developer can use to “AJAX-ify” his applications.

They start off with an introduction to what Atlas is and how it all works including the Atlas Server Controls and the Script Manager. They provide a sample bit of script here to illustrate how things fit together, including the terms/keywords EnablePartialRendering, EnableScriptComponents, ScriptReference, ServiceReference.

Next up is a look at some of the other panels/controls offered - the UpdatePanel (with the ControlEventTrigger and ControlValueTrigger), TimerControl, UpdateProgress, and how to extend and enhance the functionality already there. These include:

AutoComplete Extender
CollapsiblePanel
DragPanel Extender
AlwaysVisibleControl
TextBoxWatermark
HoverMenu

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Cross Domain XMLHttpRequests using an IFrame Proxy with Dojo

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Programming, Dojo — Chris Cornutt at 8:12 am on Wednesday, August 2, 2006

On the Dojo Toolkit blog today, there’s a pointer to information about the library’s latest built-in ability - making cross-domain requets using an iFrame proxy.

As of today, the Dojo codebase can do cross domain XMLHttpRequests (XHR) using an iframe proxy. Note that this is not using Flash or a server side proxy — it is pure JavaScript and HTML. A set of iframes (one local, one cross-domain) are used to serialize the XHR information using URL fragment identifiers.

They link to more information about this new feature, including the background of why it was added, the technologies behind it, security considerations and a bit of code to show you how it’s done.

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PHPClasses.org Ajax Upgrade

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Usability, PHP — Michael Mahemoff at 8:54 pm on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

PHPClasses.org, a useful tool for locating PHP classes, has upgraded its search. There are a couple of Ajax goodies. Search results appear as a set of tabs - Packages, Reviews, Forum, etc, and the results for each tab are obtained via remote calls. Likewise for result pagination. There’s also a Suggestion/Auto-Completion feature in the search bar - a site like this is probably a good place for Suggestions, to help explore all the library code out there without knowing precise terms to search for.

The idea is to provide a better organization of the search results. It
is an alternative to the traditional search result pages that present
pages from all site sections in mixed in a single listing.

AJAX is used to retrieve the results from different sections when the
users click on the respective section tab.

The search form also provides auto-completion support. It uses AJAX to
query the site server database and retrieve the top ten most searched
keywords that begin with the first letters typed by the user.

The site search also uses an animation Javascript class to add a nice
touch of style using fade effects to the AJAX based page updates of the
search results and progress feedback messages.

The PHP and Javascript components used in the site to implement these
AJAX and DHTML features are available as Open Source as mentioned in
this PHPClasses site blog post.

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Surveying open-source AJAX toolkits

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Articles, Toolkit — Chris Cornutt at 5:50 pm on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

In this new article from InfoWorld today, they look around the web and take stock of some of the more well-developed, strong Ajax toolkits around - six to be exact - and give an overview of them all.

If you want to add AJAX to the magic collection of buzzwords supported by your Web site (and who can resist the siren call of the latest buzzword?), then you have two major options: purchase a proprietary package or experiment with open source libraries.

InfoWorld has covered a number of excellent proprietary AJAX toolkits in the past, and now we’re turning our attention to some of their open source rivals. Are they worth exploring for enterprise use?

The six frameworks/toolkits they cover are:

Dojo
Zimbra Kabuki Ajax Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit
Open Rico and Prototype
Microsoft Atlas
Yahoo Ajax Library

They start with their reasoning behind their choices before even getting into the descriptions. They also have a reminder that these are their opinions on these toolkits, not to be taken as law - a toolkit is a personal choice.

For each of the toolkits, they talk about what it is, who makes it, how it works (all of the boring stuff) as well as their thoughts on its functionality, ease of development, and include screenshots for those more visually oriented. And, for the even more impatient in the bunch, you can skip right on down to the last page for six “cheat sheets” on the different toolkits, spotlighting the points made before.

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Simple Ajax Quiz using Atlas

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Tutorial, Atlas — Chris Cornutt at 11:06 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Been wondering how to get Atlas and Ajax to play nicely together, but just don’t know how to get started? Well, this quick tutorial might be a good place to start. They show (complete with code) how to create a simple quiz for your site.

As my first article on Code Project, I’d like to talk about a little proof of concept I created around AJAX/Atlas techologies. When I saw this screencast, I thought it could be easily used for a simple AJAX quiz system, so here I am :) Code is really simple and there’s no error management, but maybe later I’ll update this code to create a more complete solution.

Of course, you’ll need Atlas installed and some sort of database (they chose SQL Server for ease) to hold the questions, but the rest is all up to the code you enter. They step you through the creation of the tables, the actual markup to generate the page, the web service to handle the user’s response, and, finally, the Javascript code to make it all work.

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Cross Domain XHR with Dojo

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Dojo — Dion Almaer at 10:53 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

The Dojo Toolkit can now do cross domain XHR using an iframe proxy.

There is detailed documentation here thanks to James Burke.

Example

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

dojo.require("dojo.io.*");
dojo.require("dojo.io.XhrIframeProxy");
dojo.io.bind({
iframeProxyUrl: "http://some.domain.com/path/to/xip_server.html",
url: "http:/some.domain.com/path/to/api",
load: function(type, data, evt, kwArgs){
/* do stuff with the result here */
}
});

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BJAX with Greasemonkey in Firefox and IE

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Examples, IE, Firefox — Dietrich Kappe at 9:07 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

On the heels of my post about BJAX (Browser Extensions plus AJAX), I received a flood of requests asking for an example of how to build such an extension. In response, I've put together a Greasemonkey script that demonstrates how to add a simple Ajax widget to a third party web page. The example isn't particularly useful -- a translucent box that floats over the google search page and displays the current weather, updated every minute, in downtown Chicago -- but it does illustrate the basics of using GM_xmlhttpRequest as well as the pitfalls of writing Javascript that executes in the Greasemonkey sandbox. An article discussing an updated version that adds support for IE (using the Turnabout extension) and the ability to toggle the size of the widget can be found here.

If you want to do any serious development in this environment, of course, you'll want to port an Ajax framework across to use GM_xmlhttpRequest instead of XMLHttpRequest, and obey the other restrictions of the Greasemonkey sandbox.