tech ramblings

This morning I am attending Alex Russell’s Learning Ajax tutorial.
Alex begins by making the point that Ajax is not new technologies but same stuff used differently.  There isn’t yet a standard or even an agreed definition (see Wikipedia)  His basic definition is "don’t make the user blink" ie no page reload as data goes to and from the server.  This gives the advantages of desktop apps to a web app.

There’s a lot of working through code in this session, which is a little hard from the back row as the session is sold out.  His examples are at http://dojotoolkit.org/~alex/oscon/demos/  He’s going through the  examples - this stuff is very nice  (otherwise it wouldn’t be so buzzy) but I am sad that we are back to browser detection.  A good site is Quirks Mode (the slug is "hell is other browsers").  I am learning more about what you can return using the XmlHttpRequest - it doesn’t have to be XML, you can return HTML, or plain text, or JavaScript…

I have my own tutorial with Luke this afternoon ("PHP and MySQL Best Practices") and then off to the Portland PHP User Group meeting tonight, so it’s going to be a long day.    I managed an early-ish night last night though, was planning on working but the hotel internet went down about 9.30 so I got more sleep than I intended.  Every other night this week is full so it’s probably just as well.

I am looking forward to our tutorial.  Warning: there will be no discussion of development frameworks in this session (except for explaining why we’re not going to talk about frameworks ).   There are a bunch of PHP topics and a bunch of MySQL topics so it’s kind of like a set of mini-tutorials.  The good part is if you fall asleep, you can wake up later, and it will still make sense.  We probably have too much material but we’re going to check what the audience is interested in and spend more time on those topics and less on the others.