Ajax!
posted in Hurray for Geekdom |Not only is it a household cleaner and a hero of the Trojan War, but it’s also some new buzzword for a neat old web technique. Basically, using javascript, passing information between the client and the server (your browser and the webserver) on it’s own timeline.
Google Suggest (Beta) uses it; watch the results change as you type in the box.
I thought I was being slick by having one javascript function run a timer and every 60 seconds trigger another function from an included javascript page, that happened to be generated from a script on the server, which caused new items to show up without refreshing the browser. But I had stumbled upon an old technique that has been refined since it was first dreamed up. Now all I gotta do is find a place to use it.
addendum: It’s funny how kid’s brains work. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Playing with maps.google.com (another ‘AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML)’ site), I looked up the neighborhood where I last lived. I could figure out where my school was, and my kid-brain knew how to get there. And my high school too. But I had no idea which direction other things were; Merrill field was a lot closer than I remember it, Earthquake park was surprisingly close. Those were places that I only went on special occasions; we’d drive past Merrill field going downtown, or we’d drive past Earthquake park (I think ) going to the airport. Not only were they in a different direction in my brain’s atlas, but also they were a lot farther away. I wonder how I can help my daughters see the world as the way an adult sees it, or even if I should.
