Creating a Reusable Ajax Library at AjaxWorld

My Creating a Reusable Ajax Library session at AjaxWorld has officially been posted on the web site. The date and time are still to come. Below is a description of my presentation from the web site:

Creating a custom AJAX library or set of components that can be reused in any Web application.
Steps:

• The benefits of reusable AJAX components.
• The rapid development of a reusable AJAX engine.
• Connecting custom JavaScript objects to the AJAX engine.
• Rendering components from dynamic responses.
• Component integration into an existing Web application.

AjaxWorld Speakers

The AjaxWorld web site has just been updated with some of the 2007 list of speakers that will be attending the conference in New York City, March 19-21, 2007. Looks like there are some interesting topics on the agenda. I still do not know the date that I'll be speaking, but stay tuned, I'll post it here.

Practical Web Design

I recently received word that Practical Web Design magazine will no longer be published in its present form. Starting next year that magazine will continue under the same name in the US, but will contain the content from .net magazine, as sold in the UK. This simply means that PWD will become the US version of .net magazine. If you've enjoyed my Flash ActionScript contributions to PWD please spread the word and hopefully I will continue as a contributer to .net or another Future Publishing magazine.

You can see the official statment on the PWD web site. Also, if you are not already familiar with it, I would recommend visiting .net magazines' web site.

Firebug 1.0 Beta

Joe Hewitt has been working hard to provide developers with a new version of Firebug. Check out the official product web site: www.getfirebug.com. As if the existing version wasn't amazing enough, the new beta version 1.0 simply looks incredible. Here is a list of some new features:

CSS editing
Network load timing
JavaScript profiling
Command line autocomplete
Debugger watch lists
DOM editing
Separate window support

Great job Joe, you make my daily life so much easier. I would certainly pay the $25, but I do agree that you should keep the existing version free.

Presenting at AJAXWorld

I have just received word that I will be a speaker at the AJAXWorld Conference in New York City, March 19-21, 2007. I have not been notified as of what date and time I will be presenting yet, but stay tuned to find out.

Here is a blurb from the web site:
"In March 19-21, 2007 over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe will be converging in New York City to attend the East coast AJAXWorld Conference & Expo -- the most comprehensive meeting on the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Web 2.0.

Delegates will hear first-hand from the creators, innovators, leaders and early adopters of AJAX, and a slew of leading vendors will provide sneak-peeks of the very latest frameworks, tools, products and applications during the conference, which will have over 100 sessions and presentations given by 125 different speakers - the largest AJAX-focused speaker faculty ever assembled in one place at one time."

The conference will be held at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
You can find out more at the AJAXWorld Conference web site.

UPDATE: In my latest post, Creating a Reusable Ajax Library at AjaxWorld I bullet-point the steps that I will be discussing at the conference.

JavaScript Tween Objects

Check out this JavaScript animation engine. For anyone familiar with the Flash ActionScript Tween classes this library looks just as easy to use. Happy tweening...

Free Sample Chapter

A free sample chapter from my book Ajax for Web Application Developers is now available for download on my web site. Chapter 16, The Observer Pattern covers how to implement an error management system in your Ajax web applications by utilizing the Observer Pattern.

Ajax for Web Application Developers
ISBN: 0672329123
Copyright 2007 by Sams Publishing
www.samspublishing.com

JavaRanch Forums Discussion

Join me in a discussion about my new book Ajax for Web Application Developers at the JavaRanch Forums December 19-22. I'll be hanging around the forums for the duration of the week ready to answer any questions or discuss any topics of interest. I hope to see you there.

Web Design for Print

The other day I was developing a web application for my wifes' herbs class (she is studying Chinese medicine by the way) as a replacement to building charts and tags in MS Word. I built the application with PHP and MySQL and added a slick CSS front-end to render the herbs, their properties and functions as tags and charts for her to study from. As always, I had some issues along the way, but this time it was all print related. Some of the issues were:

1. Tags that were split by page breaks
2. Multiple charts per page, rather individual charts per page

I wasn't sure what to do and then I remembered the print styles that are available with CSS. I knew that this was the solution, but surprisingly I had never even used them before. I did a few searches on Google and was very happy to see that I could define where I wanted page breaks to occur by using one of the following lines of code:

page-break-before: always;
page-break-after: always;

While I was iterating the tags and writing them to the page I simply added a page-break-before to every fourth tag because three tags fit on each page. It makes me so happy when things just work as they should.

Source Code for the Book

To anyone that has purchased a copy of the book: I received an e-mail from a reader who was looking for the source code. If anyone is having trouble locating it, you must first register your book at: http://www.samspublishing.com/register, you will then be able to download the source code, view updates and errata. Thank you for buying my book, I hope that it improves your development skills and your users' experience.

Ajax for Web Application Developers

My Book, Ajax for Web Application Developers, has officially been released.

I am so thrilled; it has an extremely clean design and it's nice and compact. You can check it out on Amazon, but it is one of those things that you really have to see to appreciate.

My friend Robert Hoekman has also released a new book, Designing the Obvious. I think of it as a common sense manual for web applications. I recommend checking it out...