jQuery or Prototype
All programmers are religious zealots. So when it comes to the question of which Javascript framework to use, they will attack and defend furiously.
I've been using Prototype a lot, but recently the jQuery framework has become famous too. When one customer asked another customer recently why they insisted on using jQuery, they answered: "well, jQuery is the de facto standard"
:-) a really fundamentalist answer. Who can argue with that?
Well, I want to make up my own mind and decide for myself which tool to use, and it depends on the problem of course. So I read the following great reviews of Prototype versus jQuery
And now I know a little bit more about the strengths and weaknesses of both. And you too
I've been using Prototype a lot, but recently the jQuery framework has become famous too. When one customer asked another customer recently why they insisted on using jQuery, they answered: "well, jQuery is the de facto standard"
:-) a really fundamentalist answer. Who can argue with that?
Well, I want to make up my own mind and decide for myself which tool to use, and it depends on the problem of course. So I read the following great reviews of Prototype versus jQuery
And now I know a little bit more about the strengths and weaknesses of both. And you too
Infected
The bad guys are disguising themselves as the good guys. Interesting and dangerous.
Monday morning means coffee and visiting news sites and weblogs. When I visited one of them, my browser redirected to a page that, after some animation, looks like this:
A perfect copy of a windows explorer with evidence of viruses and trojans. The popup looks so real, I had to drag it to see it could not get outside of the browser window. Did you see the little popup on the right side there, indicating the 'antivirus' .exe was already downloaded to my machine? No doubt this would have opened up my machine to be a drone. I do not have a fixed D: drive, but it looks very very real.
No doubt many people will fall for this and execute the program. We need to secure the web in better ways, by sandboxing the browser environment or rethink the security model of the OS.
Monday morning means coffee and visiting news sites and weblogs. When I visited one of them, my browser redirected to a page that, after some animation, looks like this:
A perfect copy of a windows explorer with evidence of viruses and trojans. The popup looks so real, I had to drag it to see it could not get outside of the browser window. Did you see the little popup on the right side there, indicating the 'antivirus' .exe was already downloaded to my machine? No doubt this would have opened up my machine to be a drone. I do not have a fixed D: drive, but it looks very very real.No doubt many people will fall for this and execute the program. We need to secure the web in better ways, by sandboxing the browser environment or rethink the security model of the OS.
Lazy and Lucky?
Sometimes even typing an entire query in Google is too much work. And then, you have to press search, and then... oh terrible you have to press the link of the results too.
Now that is no longer necessary with BeyondTrees LazyLucky(tm). If you are lazy (like all good programmers are) and you're searching for something that others are searching for too, you can just type in the first letters, and you'll see the results immediately:
(in this example I was too lazy even to type in the entire word 'lazy'... and see it came up with a great answer)
I used the Prototype Javascript library to retrieve the top 10 Google suggestions for what you have typed until then, pick the top one, and feed it to Google, using the "I feel lucky" button and displaying the results in an iframe... just for fun.
Try out typing things like "why is my" or "i want you to" ;-)
Now that is no longer necessary with BeyondTrees LazyLucky(tm). If you are lazy (like all good programmers are) and you're searching for something that others are searching for too, you can just type in the first letters, and you'll see the results immediately:
(in this example I was too lazy even to type in the entire word 'lazy'... and see it came up with a great answer)I used the Prototype Javascript library to retrieve the top 10 Google suggestions for what you have typed until then, pick the top one, and feed it to Google, using the "I feel lucky" button and displaying the results in an iframe... just for fun.
Try out typing things like "why is my" or "i want you to" ;-)
The end of page based searching?
Google and Bing are both playing around with new search APIs that will allow for a much more responsive search experience than the old fashioned edit-search-viewresults-clickresult paradigm: ajax search.
You can play around with one simple example of what it feels like using the Bing Ajax API here. A bit useless to start searching for all prefixes of the query you're after, but still fun to see how responsive this is. How can this be used best? The power of the servers and the way the programming can overcome latency is good enough now to allow this type of interfaces.
People are concerned about how this will affect sites that use the search terms from Google to offer services, or even track ads and things people are interested in, if Google would apply this on their main servers instead of just testing it out. I can understand that, and this would in effect make Google Analytics an even more monopolistic user tracking tool than it already is. But fear of a new technology is not a good option, we should find new ways of dealing with it. Are we sure we cannot use some Javascript tricks to get to the referrer's hash?
Or even better: let's think of new ways of designing powerful search interfaces. Maybe it is time to forget about the pages as being atomic instances, and make your browsing and search experience more continuous and less discrete?
You can play around with one simple example of what it feels like using the Bing Ajax API here. A bit useless to start searching for all prefixes of the query you're after, but still fun to see how responsive this is. How can this be used best? The power of the servers and the way the programming can overcome latency is good enough now to allow this type of interfaces.
People are concerned about how this will affect sites that use the search terms from Google to offer services, or even track ads and things people are interested in, if Google would apply this on their main servers instead of just testing it out. I can understand that, and this would in effect make Google Analytics an even more monopolistic user tracking tool than it already is. But fear of a new technology is not a good option, we should find new ways of dealing with it. Are we sure we cannot use some Javascript tricks to get to the referrer's hash?
Or even better: let's think of new ways of designing powerful search interfaces. Maybe it is time to forget about the pages as being atomic instances, and make your browsing and search experience more continuous and less discrete?