March 31st, 2006 by Aaron N.
via Ajaxian:
Patrick Fitzgerald posted a nice screencast explaining how he diagnosed and fixed an IE memory leak in his tabifier library. He walks through using the free tool Process Explorer to watch IE’s memory grow with each page refresh. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Browser Stuff | Comments Off
March 29th, 2006 by Aaron N.
Over on Download.com we use a popup DHTML window library called overlibmws for dialogs and the like. I like this library because it works in a ton of browsers and degrades nicely, and because it’s easy to position the popups (give it an x/y for the window, tell it to center on the page, tell it to center on the mouse, tell it to position relative to an element on the page, etc.). (See previous posts about the library)
Here’s an upcoming alternative that introduces the same functionality but using prototype and scriptalicious style effects to make a slicker looking version of the same functionality. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 3rd Party Libraries, Visual Effects | Comments Off
March 29th, 2006 by Aaron N.
via Ajaxian:
When debugging your Ajax (or other Javascript) applications, you can never have too much information. Sometimes, it helps to have things all laid out there before you can really see the issue at hand. This handy little script can help you get a better idea of what the Javascript on your page is really like.
The Javascript ObjectTree Favelet superimposes the current Javascript landscape of the page you’re viewing and is as simple as clicking a link and calling a function.
This will overlay your current document with a DIV element containing a collapsed list of all the javascript object types currently referenced by the page, from functions to strings to booleans and all else that falls between. Clicking the object type – for example “function”, will expand a new list with all of the function names. Clicking one of the function names will expand into the function’s body.
So, what’s the best part of the script, you ask? Well, maybe the fact that it’s not a script at all – it’s actually a bookmarklet, making it possible for you to use it on any page you visit. All you need to do is visit their page and all the link at the bottom to your toolbar or bookmarks list. It’s that easy.

Posted in Browser Plugins | Comments Off
March 28th, 2006 by markbult
Venue Update:
Yahoo! Sunnyvale Campus
701 First Avenue
Building C, Classroom 5
Sunnyvale, CA
6-9PM, April 12, 2006
WebGuild Silicon Valley presents
Designing for Ajax: Patterns and Principles for Rich Design
—-
Date & Time:
April 12, 2006
6 – 9:30pm
Venue:
Google Inc.
900 Alta Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94043
Map & Directions
Agenda:
6pm : Food & Drinks
7pm : Presentation
—-
Overview:
With the advent of Ajax, new patterns have emerged for designing web applications. Yahoo! has recently released its design pattern library where it has begun the process of cataloging these emerging patterns. The patterns form a vocabulary for both designers and developers. However, patterns by themselves are not enough. In this talk Scott will discuss the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and present a set of design principles for applying patterns to your web designs. Each principle is explored with illustrating patterns along with a discussion of specific design caveats for each. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 'Industry' News | 3 Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Aaron N.
This may be old news to some of you.
http://www.sitevista.com/
3 min. video tour: http://www.sitevista.com/demo.asp
Let’s you preview a rendered version of your site in just about any browers. It’s not an approximation, but an actual screenshot of your site as that browser processes it. It won’t let us see how our interactive elements work (javascript/ajax). Thoughts?
Posted in Tools | Comments Off
March 24th, 2006 by Aaron N.
Get your AJAX indicators here. Simple yet useful. (via Ajax Review) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Examples, Reference | 1 Comment »
March 23rd, 2006 by Aaron N.
According to this post on the mir.aculou.us website, Justin Palmer has released event:Selectors, a “method to cleanly use CSS pseudo selectors to assign DOM events to elements on the page.”
The functionality, bearing resemblance to the behaviour.js library, hooks into all of the latest Prototype functionality and adds a few tricks of its own. They provide a code example of how this new functionality can be used:
var Rules = {
'#icons a:mouseover': function(element) {
var app = element.id;
new Effect.BlindDown(app + '-content',
{queue: 'end', duration: 0.2});
},'#icons a:mouseout': function(element) {
var app = element.id;
new Effect.BlindUp(app + '-content',
{queue: 'end', duration: 0.2});
}
}
Posted in Event Scripting, Prototype | Comments Off
March 23rd, 2006 by Aaron N.

Webreference.com has posted part one of an excerpt from the book Professional Ajax, covering XML, XPath, and XSLT. The chapter covers loading XML into the DOM, using XPath to select nodes, and transforming XML into HTML with XSLT.
Here are some reviews from around the web – the general consensus seems to be positive. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Code Snippets, Examples | Comments Off
March 17th, 2006 by Aaron N.
I’m working on a little proof of concept project and started the task of writing a simple client-side template parser. After a few hours and some significant progress, I ran into a snag where the solution I had working just wasn’t as elegant as I wanted it. “What am I doing??” I asked myself. Ten seconds and one google search later I found Trimpath’s Javascript Templating library. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 3rd Party Libraries, Code Snippets, Examples | Comments Off
March 16th, 2006 by Aaron N.
Via Ajaxian. The notion that our pages are either ajax or served whole – one or the other but never both – is one that makes our applications less usable for those in our audience without modern browsers. This looks like a potential awesome solution to the problem. I’d love to see some of our engineering talent sound off on the concept. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 3rd Party Libraries, Best Practices, Server-side Integration | Comments Off