The next time someone asks you why web programmers prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer, send them a link to this post. (Even if they don't understand it!)
The increasing popularity of Ajax technologies for web application development has increased the use of JavaScript. When I first released my first open source project, xajax, back in May of 2005, the term Ajax was only a few months old. Programming in JavaScript has since become a major part of my everyday work, and increasingly a growing number of bugs found in our applications are related to inconsistencies in JavaScript implementations in different web browsers.
Most programmers who work extensively in JavaScript have been stung, often more than once, by Microsoft's shoddy, non-standard implementation of manipulating the HTML DOM using JavaScript. IE7 has been an improvement, but it still has some bugs that make programmers want to rip out their hair.
One of the cornerstone functions for JavaScript DOM manipulation is the document.getElementById() method which allows the program to get any element in the HTML by its id attribute, which is supposed to uniquely identify that element.
This article is about a technical aspect of computer programming and since I know that many of my readers are not computer programmers, and of those that are, many do not program in PHP, you may safely ignore it unless it interests you.
As I’ve been working on a light-weight data access layer for PHP5.1+ that I hope to release as open source in the near future, I have discovered an annoying design flaw in PHP.
Support for a more object-oriented approach to programming has been greatly improved since the introduction of PHP5. PHP also offers some magic methods that can be used to simulate properties and methods without having to actually declare them individually. These are great for implementing on the fly methods and properties.
But these magic “overloading” methods don’t function exactly as expected when it comes to inherited child classes.
Over the last couple of years I have been approached by various individuals looking for a programmer to develop an LDS blog portal.
There are, of course, already a couple of popular portals for keeping up with blogging by LDS members, but there have sometimes been those who are dissatisfied with the blog selection. Some feel that too many apostate and borderline apostate blogs are included, while others don’t feel they are included enough.
Well now anyone can, with a very small amount of effort, create and host his or her own public or private LDS blog portal.
I am not really interested in maintaining my own LDS blog portal to compete with existing portals, even though the code upon which the most popular of these, ldsblogs.org, is available for free from its creator, Russ Johnston.
However, I do have an interest in new technology, and as a personal challenge, I wondered if I might be able to create a near clone of his portal, using only XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in conjunction with the nifty new Google Ajax Feed API .
Today is the one year anniversary of my open source project: xajax!
The xajax project was registered with SourceForge.net on May 24th 2005, just slightly more than 3 months after the very term Ajax was coined by Jesse James Garrett in his article published on February 18, 2005 at Adaptive Path.
We’ve come a long way since then, thanks to the great efforts and skill of Jared White and Eion Robb.
If you develop for the web, there is a new extension for Firefox that you simply must get:
Firebug combines the functionality of the DOM inspector with the Error console and command-line JavaScript interpretor and then packs it with some great additional features.
I’m pleased to announce the release of xajax version 0.2.
The xajax PHP library allows PHP developers to easily add Ajax functionality to their PHP driven websites. A big thank you to Jared White for his excellent work on the project and to our wonderful forum participants who have helped debug, submitted code improvements, and suggested feature enhancements.
Also a special thanks to those who donated money to the project. The donations will help us pay for hosting for the new xajax webite, wiki, and forum .
One interesting subject that has come up in the the xajax project forum is using our xajax library to implement PHP driven Ajax for XUL applications written to run in Mozilla based browsers like Firefox. In case you don’t know about it already, XUL is Mozilla’s XML-based User interface Language. Developers use XUL to create extensions for Firefox, among other things.
One of my many projects is xajax. I created the xajax PHP library as an open source project earlier this year to help people add Ajax capabilities to their PHP-based web projects.
We have created a beta test of the upcoming xajax version 0.2 release.
