Ted Patrick’s FXWidget

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Beau

Official Flex/AIR evangelist, Ted Patrick, has put together a simplified generated template project for Flex components (called FXWidget) in an attempt to make it easier to use flex as page-components rather than full applications. It includes the SWFObject library from Geoff Stearns and reduces the line count in the out-of-the-box index.template.html file from 108 to a mere 26. It’s far from complete, but a definite step in the right direction.

I’ve put together an extension of this library to add some more functionality and to restore the browser-history feature of flex that is included in the original template file. In my extensions, I’ve side-stepped the IE7 issues people were having in relation to loading the SWF in a script tag by loading it by preloading it through prototype.js‘s Ajax.Request method and used an onComplete closure to trigger the loading of the SWF object. I have yet to add deep-linking back to the template (Flex3).

This marks my first contribution back to the Flex community, to which I hope to contribute as much as I can. My updates this site have been… well there just hasn’t been any for a while. I’ve been “heads-down” programming at my new job since December, up to my eyeballs in Flex and FDS. Things are settling down now, so I hope to have more time to share what I’ve learned.

Click here to download the Flex2 project.

Click here to see the output examples.

Good work, Ted!

Posted in Development, Flex | 4 Comments

Prototype.js 1.5.0_rc2 Documentation Now Up!

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Beau

Sergio Pereira has updated his documentation site of Prototype.js to include the latest build (1.5.0_rc2).

I also stumbled across a png cheat sheet for Prototype.js by Johnathan Snooka.

Great job, guys!

Posted in Development | 4 Comments

Best-Practice Guidelines for AJAX Applications and Search Engines

Posted on January 2, 2007 by Beau

David Wallace @ SearchEngineWatch.com has written an interesting article on the effect of new-age web technologies like AJAX and Web2.0 on search engine crawlability. While I wasn’t aware of the impact of CSS on search engine behavior, and the impact of Web2.0 applications like Wikis and other community-driven technologies is somewhat obvious, he makes a very good point of the potentially negative impact of AJAX (or excessive AJAX) on search engines’ abilities to crawl and index your site. Wallace points out that because of the nature of AJAX, and the inability of search engines to interact with JavaScript, AJAX enabled websites will experience some hindrance of crawlability. While this is true, this can be minimized by following some basic guidelines when implementing AJAX on your web application:

  • Do not make your application UI completely AJAX driven unless it is in an environment that you do not wish to have indexed. For example: Google’s GMail is a very well-done AJAX application that effectively uses no static HTML. Every component is rendered via JavaScript in some fashion. However, since this UI is only displayed to the user after they have signed in, a search engine would never see the content anyway.
    An prime example of AJAX gone wrong is Gucci.com, who’s entire public site — as attractive as it is — is unreachable without JavaScript support. Having said that…
  • Try viewing the page with JavaScript disabled in your browser. This will help you to see what the search engine will see. A good tool to quickly toggle JavaScript support in FireFox is Chris Pederick’s WebDeveloper Plugin. Simply right-click the window, go to Web Developer -> Disable -> JavaScript.
    If you try this on Gucci.com, you’ll notice that the only thing you get is a blank screen. They may be trying some clever hack like User-Agent detection to show search engines a different set of content, but judging from a simple Google search on their domain name, I severely doubt that is the case (notice that the first few search results are blank except the domain name itself).
  • AJAX widgets add a lot of pizazz to a user’s experience on your website, but they should be used to deliver minimal content to the page, if any. Utilities like the HelpBalloons I offer here do bring content to a page dynamically, but are not intended to do heavy lifting. They are meant to add context to
  • Use the <noscript> tag to add static content to areas that would regularly have valuable content populated via AJAX.

If used properly AJAX can significantly improve a user’s experience by adding standalone application feel to an otherwise boring web site. If used improperly, AJAX can severely hurt your site’s potential by cutting off search engine indexing.

Please feel free to suggest more best-practice guidelines to append to this list.

Posted in AJAX, Development, News & Opinions | 2 Comments

Scriptaculous 1.7 to include Morphing effects

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Beau

Thomas Fuchs of Mir.aculo.us has posted some examples of the new Morphing effects in Scriptaculous‘s 1.7 beta effects library. Looking good :)

Posted in AJAX, Development, Libraries | 1 Comment

FireFox 2.0 Released (FF2.0)

Posted on October 23, 2006 by Beau

While FireFox 2.0 hasn’t officially been released (I believe the official release date is tomorrow), you can obtain the final release version from Open Source Lab’s download site.

If you’re not “in the know” about what FF2.0 is bringing to the web-browser world, you’ll probably want to visit the official FireFox 2.0 Release Notes page to get full details.
The major enhancement (in my humble opinion) to FF2.0 is JavaScript 1.7. This new version of javascript introduces generators, iterators, let expressions and destructuring assignments, as well as client-side sessions. While it will probably be a while before you can actually use all of this (due to competing browser support) it’s still a major step for JavaScript.

Download your copy of FF2.0

Posted in Browsers, Development | 1 Comment