Those crazy guys at mad4milk.net have added a bit more to the moo.fx library. Now, in addition to their animation library, prototype-lite, and ajax-lite scripts, they’ve added a 3kb selector library: moo.dom

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via Ajaxian:

Google Calendar has launched in beta, and it has a lot of great Ajax in it.

It feels like GMail and Google Reader, and has great performance.

There are some nice patterns, such as highlighting elements in yellow means that you can click to go into edit mode on that element. If you click on a date, the textual representation changes to become a date picker. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on a little project that involves creating some tools for any of CNET’s sites including our back end tools. I’ll post more on the project when it’s presentable, but in the process of working on this I have, of course, run into questions about cross domain security brick walls and how to transport portions of the data to create a consistent and persistent experience for the user.

Here are a couple of articles that I’ve found that I think could be useful:

Mashup Data Formats: JSON versus XML
This is a nice article outlining from a fairly objective perspective the differences between these two data formats/transport systems. They both have advantages and disadvantages, but it’s helped me understand when to use one vs. the other and how to get around certain problems by making the right choice at the right time.

The Case For JSON: What Is It and Why Use It?
Another article on why to use JSON that’s a little more detailed. This fellow definitely has his mind made up, so he’s not really going into xml’s positive aspects so much, but he does a great job of shining a light on JSON.

Look Ma, Cross-Domain Scripting!
Same author as the previous link but focused on one of JSON’s biggest assets: it’s ability to get across domains. It’s tricky stuff, and it’s not clear to me how to make the data go both ways (to and from a foreign server), but it has some useful code snips and demonstrations on how do do some of it.

via Ajaxian – I wonder if there’s a performance difference between using DWR and JSON:
Speed is everything when it comes to online applications. Users hate to sit and wait, especially the experienced ones. A few seconds pass and they start to think something’s broken. Knowing this, optimizing everything you can on your application can mean the difference between someone leaving or sticking around to explore the site more. One method for enhancing the speed in your app is described here on Builder.com – using JSON to speed up your Ajax script’s connection between it and the server.

XML is the standard way to interchange data, but it’s often not the best way. Although XML can add structure and metadata to data, it does so in an overly verbose way. XML also has a fairly complex syntax, requiring a non-trivial parser to attack it. In JavaScript, XML must be parsed into a DOM tree to be used. And, once you’ve constructed the DOM tree, you still have to pilot through it to create corresponding JavaScript objects or otherwise use the XML data in your client-side Web application.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

The article introduces JSON to the reader, offering a comparison with a matching XML structure. Their point of view is that XML is great for marking up data, but JSON is meant for the speed of data exchange. There’s an example provided of the difference between the same request done in both XML and JSON, with the JSON seeming to be the simpler. The article finished off with a look at how reliable JSON is for your application, and some mention of life on the other side – the server-side functionality.

I’m not geek enough to tell whether this article‘s points are credible enough or not (I’m just the design guy), but I thought I’d pass it along just in case.