Mainfram Reality

One of my colleges has noticed my posts are not very in-depth, so I thought to answer why this is in this post.I used to use eGroupWare and especially the Knowledge Base application to record little articles, code snippets, etc. I used it essentially as a knowledge base for myself. As most of the developers will tell you, keeping track of various bookmarks, code, ways of doing things is very important and it makes one a better developer. There are websites out there that do this, but I wanted one that contains just what I want.Few months ago, I redesigned my website Mainfram Innovations and decided to have a blog as well. This blog was to be just a general personal blog about my life and me. After finishing the website it became clear to me that my blog can also contain programming information, so I ditched eGroupWare and am now using this blog to record all the technical information I used to record using the eGroupWare’s Knowledge Base application.The reason why most of the posts on this blog and short and not very in depth is that I try and link to the relevant information out there and just try to give a little context as to what the post is about. If I find there isn’t much information online regarding the topic I am blogging about I try and put as much detail as possible into it. So in short, the reason the posts are not in-depth is a purely selfish one. The information is enough for me to come back to it when I need to find out some information on the topic. I would love to do an in-depth write-up on each topic I am blogging about, but at this stage I don’t have time and in most cases information I am linking to is in depth already.

The Ajax Patterns wiki is a great resource of Ajax related information. I’ve spent hours reading the website and found it to be one of the best resources for Ajax I’ve seen so far. Another great resource is Michael Mahemoff’s Blog and Podcast. The podcast has some great introductory material to Ajax. I have a little MP3 player I use to play podcast episodes in my car on my way to work every morning. It is a great way to use the 45 minute drive to and from work every day in a productive way.

After using Prototype JavaScript Framework for a few days and deciding this is the framework I want to use for my JavaScript driven web interfaces, I quickly realised how much more work I will need to do.Prototype JavaScript Framework enhances the language beautifully and adds lots of usefull features, but it does not actually have any usefull web UI components. What I am talking about are things like WYSIWYG editing, drag and drop, and other such nifty things.While browsing around for some open source, pure JavaScript examples of such components, I came across Dojo Toolkit. The toolkit is far from production ready, it is still version 0.2.2. Code it implements is nice and the toolkit has a range of interesting widgets. The toolkit implements a packaging system freeing developers from worrying which script library to include in what order.How can one talk about JavaScript libraries, frameworks and toolkits without mentioning WebFX. The two Swedes are legends and their JavaScript code is now even more relevant then ever.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about the Prototype JavaScript Framework. The framework is written and maintained by Sam Stephenson. Prototype JavaScript Framework is designed to make developing rich object oriented client side applications easy. The changes behaviour of some built in JavaScript functions to offer functionality that is easy to use, more easily then the default functionality. The library offers an Ajax API, enhancements to Arrays, additions of enumerable objects, etc. The Prototype JavaScript Framework is included in Ruby on Rails. Many JavaScript base enhancements offered by the Prototype JavaScript Framework are very rubyish, like array.each notation.After playing around with the Prototype JavaScript Framework, I found it to be very well written and designed. I was actually very surprised how much more productive I’ve become by using it. Initially I was quite sceptical about the $ notation especially, but after using it, I am now a convert.The only negative thing I can say about the Prototype JavaScript Framework is that the code documentation is non existent as well as some high level documentation. The code is very well written and easy to follow, but a casual JavaScript developer will have some hard time following the code.The official website does not have any documentation for the framework, but I have found an excellent tutorial, API documentation written by Sergio Pereira.Using prototype.js v1.4.0 by Sergio PereiraAnother great prototype documentation website can be found on the bitweaver.org website.Documentation for the Javascript library PrototypePrototype JavaScript Framework is great, and combined with Ruby on Rails the two are very impressive. I am very happy with my decision to make the two my web development platform of choice for all new developments.

Interesting article today on Australian IT news website.According to the article, google will be spending a lot of money on the Australian marker. I think the Telstra’s Sensis business is most at risk, especially the their WhereIs service. The WhereIs service is expensive to implement into existing websites, while google maps software is very easy to embed into an existing website, its free and it usability wise is years ahead of the WhereIs maps. I am looking forward to the competition between News Limited, Telstra’s, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google in Australia. I hope that the competition is going to encourage innovation from smaller players looking to be bought out by these giants and I hope a few smaller players will be able to actually compete as well.Interesting times ahead.Full Article:Google looks locally