Too often I hear people talk about adding AJAX-enabled fancy UI elements to
their website or web application to make it more “Web 2.0″ style. While
many Web 2.0 applications do include these elements of AJAX, gradients,
and glossy style, those features are not what characterizes them as Web 2.0
applications.
Web 2.0 is about the culture of participation. Web 2.0 is about the
Internet as a platform. A typical Web 2.0 site becomes more interesting
and valuable as it’s community of users grow. Web 2.0 puts the user and
the content they contribute as the primary actors in most of it’s use
cases. A Web 2.0 site makes it’s data available to be mashed into new
applications.
Let’s consider an example. Imagine that you own a website that presents
information about baseball to users. You may hear advice that you should make
your site more Web 2.0. That person migh... (more)
By now most web developers are familiar with Ajax and the benefits that it
provides. In short, Ajax allows you to communicate asynchronously from the
browser to a server. This is usually done using the XMLHttpRequest object
which is now supported in all major browsers. Anyone who has used Ajax
extensively is probably also aware of the cross-domain limitation placed on
it. The cross-domain limitation means that you can only communicate from
the browser back to the domain from which the JavaScript was served.
Browser restrictions prevent you from using Ajax to communicate with... (more)
As an avid baseball fan, I’ve always been interested in the statistics that
surround baseball. More so than in any other sport, baseball is a game ruled
by statistics. In this post, I will describe a program that I wrote in the
Ruby language to generate box scores for any Major Leage Baseball(MLB) game
by using the live XML data provided by MLB. Ruby makes it easy to do using
plain Ruby along with just a few libraries.
Live MLB Data
The amount of raw data that MLB makes available is extensive. It includes all
of the traditional boxscore statistics plus deep detail on every pitch t... (more)
XML seems to be popping up everywhere. In this article, I'm going to touch on
an often overlooked but potentially very powerful use for XML technology: XML
for project management and documentation. Thanks to the open source
community, there are some marvelous tools available for incorporating XML
into your software development processes.
Throughout this article I refer to a project's infrastructure. I use the term
infrastructure to refer to things such as a project's directory structure,
developer mailing lists, build processes, deployment sites, source code
configuration manage... (more)
As open source technology is gaining more popularity in the press and among
the general population, there still seems to be a lack of knowledge of what
is available via open source amid many software development projects. While
the mainstream media and the average computer user thinks of Linux whenever
the term open source is brought up, this article looks at the amazing wealth
of technology available to Java software development teams. For years there
have been promises of code reuse resulting from the use of object-oriented
programming. The open source community is delivering o... (more)