This morning I attended Stuart Halloway’s Ajax on Rails tutorial. The slides from his presentation are available here, here and here. This was the first time I’d attended one of Stuart’s presentations and I was impressed by his relaxed presentation style. He also seems to be a genuinely nice fellow – during the break, I spoke briefly with him to see if he would be interested in speaking about Streamlined to the NoVA RUG.
This morning I attended Amy Hoy’s JavaScript Boot Camp tutorial. The slides should be available online shortly at Amy’s website – I’ll update this post once she publishes them.
She provided a good overview of JavaScript as a language, some of the issues with the various implementations, how to debug it and some of the libraries available for use.
Updated: The slides are located here.
I was playing around with Digg this morning and noticed Digg Spy. At first I thought it was really cool and wondered how they did that. Then I realized it’s just a bit of Ajax and, as anyone who’s read Pragmatic Ajax knows, Ajax is easy! So read on for how I implemented an Ajax spy in Rails and to download the code.
You know that really cool screencast at the Ruby on Rails website where Rails is used to create a Flickr interface in 5 minutes? Well, I followed the screencast and built my own copy and then I enhanced it with some additional JavaScript (Lightbox style preview of the images and a blind-up on subsequent searches). Note that in the course of making my changes I found out the proper ordering of the JavaScript callbacks (see this) – even though you would think that :before would be called prior to a :complete, it doesn’t always happen that way (so sometimes the new results are blinded-up and not shown).
I’ve been meaning to upload this for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. So today I updated it to work with Rails 1.1.1 (though didn’t switch the Ajax-y goodness over to RJS). Hopefully other folks can benefit from the code. To run it all you have to do is first install the flickr ruby gem, like so:
sudo gem install flickrand unzip and run this Rails app. Enjoy!
Rich White has accepted my patch to add graceful JavaScript degredation to his excellent AjaxScaffold for Rails. You can read about it here.
I’m also trying to get drag-and-drop sorting working in the AjaxScaffold, though I’ve run into some issues. See Thomas Fuchs’ answer to my issue.
Alex Russell gave an interesting talk this morning on Building Responsive Web UIs with DHTML. My notes are below.
Updated Aug 6, 12:38: I fixed the errors in the post pointed out by Alex Russell. BTW, he’s an excelllent speaker, if he ever gives a talk and you are able to go, I heartily recommend doing so.
