I’m all for expertise. Experts, people who push through and make something stunning—we need more of them. But let’s be honest, if you’re not in the habit of being an expert, it’s unlikely your current mode of operation is going to change that any time soon.
Go, give a speech. Go, start a blog. Go, ship that thing that you’ve been hiding. Begin, begin, begin and then improve. Being a novice is way overrated.Seth Godin
Tag: AJAX
Getting up to speed
Another year and another chance to try some new things. In the last few years I have been toying around with AJAX and even built a few small scale applications using this. I tried a few different toolkits, some commercial and some opensource, before settling on Sajax. It is not as feature laden as others (Dojo and Backbase) but for my needs it gets the job done.
However, AJAX was last years new development buzz for me to try. This year it will be XForms. Why? Well...why not? I want to learn more about it and how it is used. I am finding that quite a challenge. I have googled all sorts of blogs and read the W3Schools tutorials and I am fear I am a long winding road to a distant land. Plus, the distractions of actually doing work are slowing me down even though it is exactly this work for which I wish to use XForms.
AJAX Toolkits
Ajaxian conducted a recent survery on Ajax toolkits/frameworks. The "winner" was Prototype ( a new one to me ) which is a Ruby-based framework. Wow! I did not realise there were so many AJAX frameworks out there! I use Sajax ( it is simple ) and have been experimenting with Backbase ( too complex for me ). PHP turns out to be the most popular server-side web development platform. Good news for me. I have been using PHP more often than Perl now. I have been using the Sajax toolkit for a few months now and I really like it. True to it's name it is simple to setup and use. I tooled around with Backbase but...the learning curve and complexity required more time than I have patience for. I also very quickly tired the Dojo AJAX toolkit/framework. I think that one has potential ( easy to use and lots of features ) and I may come back to it later.
