„Ajaxifizierte“ Web-Anwendungen zu bauen ist das Ausbildungsziel dieses hervorragenden Einsteigerwerkes. Der Leser erfährt auf den rund 250 Seiten was Ajax bedeutet, wie er es richtig einsetzt und welche Konsequenzen es für seine Web-Anwendung hat. Das Autoren-Trio setzt dabei auf eine Anwender-zentrierte Sichtweise der Problembehandlung von Ajax und gibt wertvolle Tipps, die auch für fortgeschrittenere Ajax Anwender wertvoll sind.
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Blog
Rezension: AJAX – Eine pragmatische Einführung..
Multiple Tag Typeahead
Autocomplete or Typeahead is one of the most common Ajax Patterns. For my example I am using the script aculo us libary respectively the ajax-autocomplete control. The goal of this small tutorial is to create an type ahead mechnism for multiple tags in one input field. The problem with the basic feature of the autocomplet controller of script aculo us is, that it only handles the value of an element as input string (not only a part of it as we need it for this solution). But we want the user to be able to enter several tags and use the autocomplete feature ONLY for the last entered tag. Here is a screen of what the final solution will look like:
1 hour of wordpress templating
Last week I started again with some template designing for wordpress, cause I’m not satisfied with the layout of some of my blogs. I want to make a style like the famous US blogs techcrunch and readwriteweb (3 colums, 2 sidebar elements..).
I began my journey with creating a simple wrapper for a wordpress template, which is a work of just a few minutes. WordPress gets a lots of critisism because ot the templating mechanism which do not offers a strict seperation of layout and code. I don’t bother and must admit that wordpress ist still my number #1 blog system. The two screens show first the basic wrapper, which is the base for my theme and the second one showing a semi finished theme with the colors of this blog here. All in all, just one hour of work.
As you can see, you can use the basic wrapper to create a really powerfull and stylish template just using CSS. You can download the wrapper here, and give it a try to create your first wordpress template!
Download: basic.zip
openKE Design changes
I’m developing and designing openKE now for about 4 month. It have been sometimes quite a challenging project cause I never developed such a big application on my own. I don’t know how many lines of codes the app now have, but I guess about 20000. It’s now time for me to review the project, learn from the mistakes I’ve made (not many 😉 ) and now put all my energy in launching the service and try to make it that successful, as I hope that it may be.
Looking back on the different designs of the openKE user interface:
onsite widget v0.1
I created a little app to display a tool window on any website you want. The small widget is based on the great prototype window class by Sébastien Gruhier. I just made it work within a website with a little dirty iframe hack. You can see my work in action here. The very cool thing about this widget is, that it stays on top when your are navigation through a specific site.
This is just a proof of concept release. I will implement soon some improvments, flexibility in the code – maybe port it do java/jsp – and add some demo application that can be used with this widget. I will provide a download soon, so please don’t copy the stuff (source code is mostly viewable) right now.
Rezension: AJAX UND PHP
PHP, eine schon seit Jahren populäre Web-Technologie, wird hier mit AJAX gemischt und man erhält einen Cocktail, der einer zeitgemäßen Web Anwendungen gerecht wird. Das Buch liefert eine breite Grundlage und gute Beispiele, die hervorragend demonstrieren, was mit den beiden Techniken in Kombination machbar ist.
(more…)new year – new flavour
Yeah, something changed here: I spent this day whit optimizing the design of this page. I still do not like the top part, especially the header image, so there will be even more changes in the next few days.
So whats going on? – Not much. I spent the last 2 weeks on redesigning some of my projects and some bug fixing on openKE. There will be soon much more rumors about this project of mine cause I will start to make some good voice for it and promote on several pages. There are still some features to implement and some security issiues to fix but i think of a launch very soon cause of possible competitors, although it still think it’s a unique idea!
Some new topics I am thinking on: mobile podcasting and mobile social networking. I’m planning to use some modules of the openKE application to build other community based plattform out of it. Some of my thoughts and future trends can be found here.
OpenKE Alpha Launch
Now, after 2 and a half month of developing my new project openKE.org is ready fpr a soft launch. Since the last infos i published here, a lot of stuff has changed, too much to list it all here. The User interface is now only in German, but I’m trying to change that in the near future and also made the plattform available in English. Registration is now open for anybody, so give it a try! Like always feedback is very welcome.Rezension: AJAX Hacks
Die deutsche Übersetzung von AJAX Hacks ist ein hervorragendes Handbuch für alle, die bereits mit der Entwicklung von dynamischen Webseiten vertraut sind und anhand von praktischen Beispielen rasch in die Thematik einsteigen wollen. Die gut portionierten „Hacks“ liefern fertige Lösungen für konkrete Anwendungen und sind dank hoher Praxisrelevanz gut in bestehende Anwendungen integrierbar.
(more…)OpenKE Update 2
Another time to present another new logo. Now with more web2.0 flavour. I think this will be the final one. Beta registration for openKE is no open – feel free to register and test the features of the plattform. Development goes on all little bit though, cause I spent most of the time in doing bug fixes or optimizing the code.New features will come soon: I’m planning an user rating system based on the number of postet bookmarks, and valuable comments in the groups. I think no community based app can do without such ranking mechanisms to encourage people to be active. Another part I’m currently inplementing is an automatically generated user skill profile based on the data from searches and other action an user makes on openKE. The system will learn from the actions of the user and will group data sets to get a view of the users intrests and maybe also his skills. This feature is a little bit delicate part because of issues like privacy etc.
I got quite a good feedback from the first user of openKE – thank u for that. Stay tuned for more infos.
