brentashley

I just got the baton from Mike Papageorge

So, here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer:

Yeah, bite me, RIAA – nice meme idea. I’m not falling for it.

The last CD I bought was:

“How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”

jazz standards by Beverly Taft

Bought directly from the artist at a show. Boo hoo for the middleman.

Song playing right now:

“Record Body Count”

Rheostatics – Melville album

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Jane Monheit – Honeysuckle Rose
Jimmy Smith – Blues for J
Nat King Cole – Route 66
Dave Brubeck – Take Five
Rob McConnell, Ed Bickert, Don Thompson – Sleepin’ Bee

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

Tim Aiello
Adam Marsh
Ian Marsman
Joey de Villa
Roland Tanglao

As an example of a cool Ajax app in action, I’ve reinstated the embedded Blogchat on my blog here. If I’m online, you’ll be able to chat with me when you visit my blog. You can detach the Blogchat into a separate window if you like.

Adam Marsh has come out of the gates running with his new Econometa blog.

I met Adam last week in San Francisco and he struck me as an insightful and knowledgeable guy who contributes well to a conversation. Just the kinda guy to add to my blogroll.

Speaking of blogroll, I’ve got some maintenance to do. I’ve recently updated my MT installation so I’ll be tweaking here in my copious free time.

Here’s a great example of unobtrusive Ajax in action to solve one of the most annoying problems about web forms – auto-saving textarea input so you don’t lose your uncommitted work in a browser crash.

And it’s all made possible by Gregory Wild-Smith’s Sack of Ajax library – although it’s hard to really call something that light a library, it would hardly fill an index card!

There’s a certain amount of uninformed griping going on over at BurningBird.

Wow, I wish I had been there, heh heh.

Seth Dillingham wonders what’s up with weblogs.com, which seems to be ignoring pings from at least a number of blogs hosted at Conversant.

My friend Terry Frazier, very much alive, laments the implications of the ignored pings.

I was talking to Technorati‘s Derek Powazek this week at the Ajax Summit and he was telling us how their service uses these pings (and other external services from furl and del.icio.us) to do their magic.

If we can’t be reasonably confident of service levels from these resources, how can we be confident in the other services upon which they rely? What recourse have we to demand that problems are fixed or to expect that emails will receive responses?

I’ve spent the last couple of days in San Francisco at the Ajax Summit hosted by O’Reilly and Adaptive Path. You can find notes on the summit at Ajaxian.

Many many thanks are due to Adaptive Path and O’Reilly for having the foresight to draw together such an exciting multidimensional braintrust.

Since Jesse’s article a few months ago which coined the Ajax name, the community has sounded like an orchestra warming up – many players making squeaks and squawks, adjusting their tuning along the way, the odd trumpet blast and cymbal crash. This summit brought us all together and introduced us to this new arrangement of an old favourite and while we’re not ready for Carnegie Hall, we ended up with some very pleasant harmonic passages, the odd memorable solo, and the sense amongst all of us that we’re now going off in our different directions humming our own variations of the same tune.

I came up with an architectural diagram shown below which, while open to refinement, describes for discussion purposes the layers of communication in a rich internet application, and it forms the basis of this newly arranged WebDev favourite. The toolkits that are currently available and being developed provide different ranges of coverage of the model, allowing you to:

• have the toolkit do it all from top to bottom (e.g. Ruby on Rails)
• provide your own back end and have the middle and front end taken care of for you (e.g. JackBe, which has an incredible toolset)
• use a component based framework like Dojo, where you can plug in different transport (iframe, XMLHTTP, script injection) or encoding layers (XML, JSON, delimited text)
• make browser-based RPC calls with SAJAX and do the UI part yourself
• intertwine HTML/CSS and Flash, use Flash for behind the scenes transport and advanced presentation (did you know that there are open source Actionscript compilers now? Flash sure ain’t any more what you think it was)

These are vastly different approaches, but we agreed that they are all forms of Ajax – using sub-page information transfer to support a rich interface that allows developers to be freed from some of the constraints of conventional stateless http page-refreshing web design and to be able to better collaborate with user-experience focused UI designers to make applications that are intuitive and responsive.

Please, by all means, join into the conversation wherever you see it discussed and however you want to contribute.