Degradable Ajax?"> Degradable Ajax?

Developing an Ajax application can be a little bit difficult. Creating an Ajax web application that is both useful and degradable IS difficult. However this two goals can be achieved quite easily if you are using the right tools.

Right now there is only one tool that I know of that offer both these desired features: MX Ajax Toolbox. You can look at this very impressive demo
and you can try to disable JavaScript from your browser to see how it works.

Quoting from the website: MX Ajax Toolbox consists in a set of tools that allows you to solve two main use-cases:

1. Build AJAX sites from scratch (Rich Internet Applications) – with or without using a database connection.
2. Update legacy websites with interactive AJAX controls and widgets.

The Ajax image gallery from my site is one of the widgets provided by this toolbox.

Biggest AJAX problem

Or, how I found myself in front of a 700 MB memory footprint Firefox.

AJAX is becoming the new “de facto” standard in the web application industry. Every where you look on the web there are changes and on almost all sites to approach the AJAX world. Gmail and Yahoo Mail are some of the biggest web applications implementing AJAX and the results on both are amazing.

Browser world

If you ask a JavaScript developer about what is the biggest problem of JavaScript programming it will probably tell you it’s browsers’ incompatibilities. This is a very big issue and as long as the major players will not come to an understanding (and unfortunately they won’t) and provide a common ground it will remain a big issue.

I will not mention here other problems from the CSS world for example.

Fortunately along with AJAX came a lot of frameworks and libraries that address this problem and hide the ugly details from the programmer.

The PROBLEM

In my opinion there is a worse problem then hacking your way around bugs and differences. That problem is represented by memory leaks.

JavaScript VM comes with a garbage collector and aside from some edge cases you might encounter, it does a pretty good job. Once you close a page a lot of work is done behind the scene to clear unreferenced objects. A lean, mean cleaning machine.

Well… AJAX can mess this up. The page is not closed any more.

The problem is not AJAX in itself as a programming paradigm but in what it can do for the application. With AJAX you can retrieve data from the server without closing the page and rebuilding it. And that data is placed inside the same page and manipulated by JavaScript programs. New DOM objects are created over and over, new JavaScript objects are created based on those data, new events are attached to all this objects. Few programmers destroy those object and unattache the events.

AJAX is still young and most of the people that have done some AJAX implementation for their site are just pulling some HTML parts from the server and using innerHTML to replace the content of a div element. No harm done. As the applications are becoming more and more complex the use case changes. XML or JSON is pulled from the server and DOM objects are created based on them. It is very easy to forget something.

Unfortunately most JavaScript programmers are sloppy. They were taught to be that way by the old browsing habits. There was no need to clean after you. When the page needed some more information, it was regenerated on the server and rendered again by the browser. A clean sheet to work on. Everything that was persistent were the cookies on the browser.

Taking care of your things in JavaScript is harder than you think. Very good programmers missed this. I was using an AJAX application from a well known company (not here to throw the stone) and after heavy usage for about two days without closing my browser, it reached the respected 700 MB footprint in my laptop’s memory.

New AJAX Image Gallery"> New AJAX Image Gallery

I’ve changed the ajax image gallery from my site. The previous one was done entirely by me and it was a good tool at it’s time.
Now a way better one is on my site. See the title link. It is looking a lot better, it has a thumbnail strip that it’s very useful and it handles really smooth.

Do you want to know more about it, from where do I have it? Stay tuned as I will make this known in a short time.

AJAX – microlink pattern tutorial"> AJAX – microlink pattern tutorial

I have written a small tutorial about how a microlink can be created using prototype.js and script.aculo.us. The source code is also available.

The tutorial is in the AJAX articles section on this site. Just click on the title.

JSP Online HTML Editor

Any CMS needs an authoring tool (authorware). Most of them rely on an online HTML editor that helps the managers to add content in their system. But a good online HTML editor does more then just edit a piece of HTML. Or better, editing/creating an HTML is a little more complex then just entering some text and bold some words.

KTML 4.1.0 is a JSP Online HTML Editor that does all this and even more. It is the last version from InterAKT and it’s behavior is enhanced using AJAX for a better usability.

HTML Editing

In most of the cases a piece of content is added inside a CMS from a document already written in Word or some other office application. For this case KTML come with a ‘Paste from Word’ feature that strips down all unnecessary formatting.

KTML4 comes with a familiar looking toolbar. It resembles the Word toolbar and it has the same functionalities. One key feature is that a CSS file can be added to the KTML to be used in the style dropdown.

But adding styles and other formatting to the HTML is not all. You must be able to edit them in a simple manner, without going into the HTML source. For that purpose KTML 4 comes with a lot of property inspectors.

Of course that if you are skilled in HTML you can go into the source code and edit it to your likeing.

Templates

For reusable blocks of HTML, KTML 4 comes with a templating engine. The user can select a piece of HTML inside the KTML and save it for later use as a template. This templates are saved on the server as HTML files. One can also upload HTML files as templates.

Online File Browser

I’ve mentioned the file upload so I must say that KTML 4 comes with a very good online file browser. This file browser lets you to manage a folder structure on the server and manage the files in this structure. It has three working modes: documents, templates and media.

For the media mode the user has access from the file browser to an online image editor, so last fine tunning of an image is now possible directly on the server.

Spellchecking

No good editor is complete in our days without a spellchecking tool. So KTML 4 has a spellcheck tool that uses an aspell on the server. In addition to this, if the client does not have access to an aspell on it’s server, the KTML 4 can be set up to use the spelling web service from InterAKT.

Security

This article does not try to be a comprehensive description of all the KTML4 features. I only try to outline some of the features that caught my attention and impressed me. But there is one very important aspect that must be mentioned. KTML 4 was build to be secure. Because KTML 4 uses AJAX to power it’s usability, all the calls to the server are checked both into the client and onto the server. The online file browser was treated with special attention, no call, true or fake, can alter files outside the designated box (folder specified by the administrator on the server).

All the modules are easy to set up and using a role based security system in the CMS the admin can enable them only for some roles (eg. the file browsing can be disabled for low level clearance).

Demo

A lot can be said about KTML 4 but I suggest looking at the demo to see how it works and make an impression about it.

Where do we go.

The web is at 2.0 version. Or at least this is the buzz word of the day. The social web. The new Internet.
Actually I think that no one knows where are we at this moment. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, they all have their own vision about the web. And this to name only a few.

The world is small

I’ve heard in a TV ad the other day: the world is small. The globalization theory is considering the economical, the political and the cultural aspects of the human life. But there is another: the informational aspect. We are surrounded now by information. Right now this is not the most important aspect of our life as a global nation. For some individuals (like myself) it is, but for a lot of people the other three aspects of life are a lot more important.

In a lot of countries the information comes from a political or religious leader. In others, the “free and liberal” countries, the information comes from TV and newspapers.
[I've quoted free and liberal as in fact, from the ancient time when the homo sapiens was hunting and collecting fruits, the human race has not been really free. We are now bound to a society and to the laws, to our credits and generally to what is considered a normal social behavior. And I do not say that as it would be a wrong thing but only to state a fact. There is no fun in freedom if it's chaos.]

Playground and Office

We get our information from the web and we need our information to be fresh. We are in a newspaper store and we are looking for the last hour news not for a day old newspaper. We need our information to be condensed and to the point (not like this article tends to be). We are in a hurry and we do not have time to waste. And more to this, if the delivered information is already filtered to our needs (more like the sport section in a newspaper) it’s a lot better.

We also work, play, shop and date on the web. The web is our playground and also our office. For those of us who read more emails in one day that letters in the whole life, for those of us who write easier on laptop and only use a pen to write down their signature on some paper, the web 2.0 is a promise and maybe a part of reality. (Of course if we can also make some money out of it… )

Let’s now consider the following. Five years ago a 128kb network connection was affordable only by companies. Now I’m writing this article at my laptop at home over a 512kb network connection and that is the cheapest one I can get from my cable provider. This tells us one thing. The days of simple and slick html are over. Maybe there are few of us that still appreciate a simple site but we are only relics of the past. Bandwidth is no longer a problem and web applications care less and less about it. Radio over the net, VoIP, video streaming.

Web applications grew in complexity also. Google maps, Amazon, Yahoo.. are all this web 2.0?

Enter RIA.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIA’s typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server. (definition from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Application)

So, web applications vs. desktop application. Web is becoming our office so tools for this kind of office emerge. We keep out information on the web so we need tools to work with that information. We can now edit our documents on the net with Word like tools, we can edit images, write emails on dedicated servers and read news on special aggregators.

So we have web applications that behave more and more like desktop ones. Will desktop application change to behave more like web applications? Not likely. The changes will be on the web side. They will change to behave like desktop applications but not loosing their benefits.

The future

What will emerge, I think, will be a generic client-server application. The interface will be defined in a new definition language (maybe that language is here, XUL and MXML are potential candidates), the client application logic will be written in an ECMA n.0 language (JavaScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, both look promising) and the data sharing between client and server will be done in an XML format(json supporters will hang me for the heresy but I have my reasons not to suspect a long life for it).

If everything is on the web, the data, the applications, we will need something to manage all this: WebOS. WEB 3.0?

WEB 2.0 – MyFeedz – the social newspaper"> WEB 2.0 – MyFeedz – the social newspaper

InterAKT has entered the web 2.0 market with an online intelligent news aggregator. Right now is in Beta stage but is neat and useful.

Quoting from the site:

Your favorite topics and those of other myFeedz users are then added and combined with our ranking algorithms to show you more relevant content.