Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I'm in the middle of the final stages of coding a hefty AJAX-based mashup application, that works with multiple sites and services (five at the last count). I have to say, Yahoo! Pipes makes the job a lot easier, as it lets me take an RSS feed and render it as JSON - which means I can do a cross-domain mashup using the JSON callback hack.

It took me quite a while to realise that Pipes was the fix I needed. If I wasn't doing it all hosted on a Software as Service platform, I'd be using Flex or writing my own proxy code to deal with the cross domain issues. I toyed with a Dojo approach, but its cross domain hack requires more control of the originating service than I had - seeing as it's a weather feed that just takes a URL with latitude and longitude. The Flash proxy approach might have worked if the remote site had a crossdomain.xml file, but it didn't...

Still, I'm pleased that I have finally broken the back of a problem that's been bugging me for the last few days.

So that's Salesforce.com as a data source and host, Google Local for geocoding, Google maps for mapping and information display, Weatherbug for location-based weather RSS, and Pipes to convert RSS into JSON. An interesting combination, showing that Web 2.0 is as much a business tool as a consumer technology.

While I'm enjoying the varied conversations on everything from the economics of the China Japan relationship to the future of supercomputing here in San Diego at FiRe, you can read a snippet of my visit to The AJAX Experience in San Francisco at the Developer Register.

Sometimes it seems that you’ve waited ages for an AJAX framework to come along, and then suddenly there’s a whole queue of them lined up, ready for testing. The latest to join the line up is Macromedia - sorry, Adobe now - with its Spry AJAX framework, which you can download here.

Announced and demonstrated last week at The AJAX Experience conference in San Francisco, Spry builds on work done with Flash and Flex, and focuses on working with XML data, as well as providing display widgets and effects. With tools to handle master-detail relationships Spry is an effective way of building, and “AJAXifying”, the type of user interface that’s become familiar to anyone building Flash applications. It’s also a lot easier to code than traditional AJAX approaches…

Read on here.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. However this conference is just far too interesting to spend much time blogging!

albumart.org

Just type in the name of a CD (or DVD) or an artist, and it'll pull back all the relevant cover art images from Amazon.

Great fun to play with! It's just a pity that you can't bookmark your searches...

Google has just launched its beta RSS reader. An online tool like Bloglines, it imports OPML lists of your RSS feeds from your existing readers and seems to display full text feeds in an AJAX browser. There's filtering and search as well (which is what you'd expect from the folk at Google).

You will need a Google account to use it. Not surprising, as it stores subscription information.

I'll be playing with it over the next few days - once I've persuaded it to import my blogroll...

Update: This is looking very interesting, with keyboard controls and a "lens" UI for the reader.

Back in my ecommerce consultancy days, I used to makeencourage my developers to read Scott McCloud's excellent Understanding Comics (and, later, Reinventing Comics), so that they could get their heads around the semiotics of stateless loosely-coupled user interfaces by understanding that in western comics the action happens between the panes - just like all the work happens in that gap between the screens of a web application...

Web 2.0 blows that analogy away, as we move to a more seamless, consistent web user experience with technologies like AJAX.

However I just had a revelation.

Japanese comics are like AJAX, in that everything happens in the pane as you read it...

So now I'll make my developers read Akira.

[expanding on a comment to karentraviss]

...as the Guardian prints my piece on AJAX, the technology behind Google Maps (and chunks of this site). So if you want a quick introduction to the future of the web, take a look at "Old dog learns new tricks".

The web has been wonderful for reading information but not so good for more complex tasks such as filling in forms or handling email. That's because everything has to be sent from the remote web server: booking holidays, online banking and similar applications often involve filling in the boxes, clicking a button, waiting for a result ... then filling in all the boxes again.

But this is starting to change with the arrival of responsive new systems such as Google Maps and Flickr. These are, effectively, applications which run inside your web browser, meaning you don't have to refresh the whole page to get the information you want.

Read on for what AJAX means for the future - and a little scoopette on what it means for Microsoft's Longhorn and its Avalon user interface...

[as always you can find an archive of my Guardian features here.]

I'm actually quite amused that I've got what's essentially a developer piece into a national newspaper

Researching a Guardian piece, I came across Tripods.

It's a multi player game running over a Google map of New York. Click the buttons to move your piece and attack the invading tripod blobs, while moving the map around. Just don't get squashed by the tripods. You can even talk to other players to set up a strategy, all by the magic of AJAX...

Why yes, I am working!