Thursday, January 10, 2008

beating blogger into submission

Blogger really isn't setup to give you a multipage blog, nor does it make sharing widgets easy. However, collapsing geography is now broken up a bit more. Once I get through the next two O'Reilly books, will definitely have to muck around more.

Almost done with the "Head Rush Ajax" book. It's a good thing that I didn't review it early in the process, because the annoyance around getting the examples to run was higher than expected since they require PHP. Fortunately, MAMP solved that problem and I've been having a blast with the book. Some of the javascript examples are really painful because the authors are trying hard not to teach js, so if you're a programmer, you'll immediately want to improve the script as you go. Other than those two quirks, I've been enjoying my homework quite a bit.

3 comments:

Dave Briccetti said...

Hi Cory. I enjoyed your talk on Second Life at SDForum, Sept, 06.

About JavaScript and AJAX: are you learning to hand-write everything, or are you looking at libraries like DWR, YUI, Prototype, and JQuery?

Dave Briccetti

cory ondrejka said...

I'm handwriting first before moving on to the libraries. I like to understand technology -- when possible -- before using it.

Do you prefer any particular libraries?

Dave Briccetti said...

I'm a consultant, so the choice of JavaScript libraries has often already been made by the client.

I like DWR for talking to Java. It'll do RPC, and transfer whole object graphs very neatly. jQuery has some nice features, like performing an operation on all DOM elements matching a class name or some other type of criteria. Yahoo UI Library (YUI) is exquisitely documented and comes with lots of excellent examples. A recent FLOSS Weekly podcast episode interviews Yahoo's Nate Koechleya about YUI.

I believe a lot of Rails folks like Prototype and script.aculo.us.

I look forward to following your progress, and to seeing what big things you do next.

Dave Briccetti