Professional AJAX is a new book in the Wrox Programmer to Programmer-Series, written by Nicholas C. Zakas, Jermy McPeak and Joe Fawcett. Sreejith has reviewed it and thinks it is the best book on the topic so far.
(via AJAX Blog)
The O’Reilly Radar has figures about their book sales, showing the market for web programming literature has increased by 22% since last year, but also seeing books about JavaScript rising by 99%! Clearly, this is an indicator for the rising AJAX usage in web projects over the last months.
(via AJAX Magazine)
Photo sharing site BubbleShare has added a nice AJAX feature which is really cool.
Called BubbleZoom, it provides a 3x zoom on every picture available through BubbleShare. You can try it yourself, simply click the BubbleZoom button and hover the image to see it in action.
Craig Maloney has written a review on the book Foundations of AJAX by Ryan Asleson and Nathaniel T. Schutta, published by Apress.
Where Foundations of Ajax shines is it’s no-nonsense introduction, implementation, and expansion of the basics of Ajax programming, leaving the reader confidently ready to utilize the concepts within. The authors have seen the potential of Ajax, and competently convey their expertise and enthusiasm for this technology.
(found in AJAX Magazine)
AdvancedAJAX is a JavaScript object encapsulating and simplifying the usage of XMLHttpRequest for doing AJAX-style calls to a server from within a web page. It provides methods for querying the server, error handling and HTML form support, and may be used in non-commercial and commercial projects.
AdvancedAJAX is a JavaScript object allowing to use XMLHttpRequest object easier and speeding up development of AJAX based projects. It consists a bound of methods helping creating queries, error handling, usage with HTML forms as well as connection timeouts and reconnecting.
(found in digg)
Rasmus Lerdorf, original creator of PHP and now working for Yahoo, does not like complex, feature-blown MVC frameworks fpr creating web applications. He has written a new Tutorial, creating a “no-framework PHP MVC framework” using only PHP5, JSON and the Yahoo! UI Library, suitable for creating the next fancy Web 2.0 site.
Many frameworks may look very appealing at first glance because they seem to reduce web application development to a couple of trivial steps leading to some code generation and often automatic schema detection, but these same shortcuts are likely to be your bottlenecks as well since they achieve this simplicity by sacrifizing flexibility and performance. Nothing is going to build your application for you, no matter what it promises. You are going to have to build it yourself. Instead of starting by fixing the mistakes in some foreign framework and refactoring all the things that don’t apply to your environment spend your time building a lean and reusable pattern that fits your requirements directly. In the end I think you will find that your homegrown small framework has saved you time and aggravation and you end up with a better product.
Rasmus provides a step-by-step tutorial from defining the goals of his project, explaining why and how to do the MVC method and showing the actual code, and also provides an example application.
(found in SitePoint’s PHP blog)