Comments on: Bookmarks and back button history for AJAX apps

By: blacklight

blacklight — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:43:31 +0000

One of the problems with AJAX is the back button being 'broken' because when navigating with ajax, you aren't refreshing a whole page just partial pages. There is a fix though... a way to map partial pages to whole pages and store it in the page history. I found it on www.zedwood.com, the AJAX Back button fix.

By: Bill Brown

Bill Brown — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:50:53 +0000

If you want to stand by your analogy, tell me how to make a good coffee without mentioning ground beans, water, and steamed milk.

Well, this is like a year after the fact, but I saw something that caught my eye and thought I’d toss my two cents in: Jaffa’s point is valid, but only to a degree. Working off the analogy posted before, Jaffa responded with a statement which included the quote above. Flip that around and you see the two sides of this debate. Try this: Tell me how to make a good coffee without mentioning coffee.

For me, the simple use of a buzzword doesn’t immediately mean you’re an idiot. Not knowing the definition of the buzzword means you’re an idiot. Programmers are inherently lazy, at least the good ones I think. A programmer knows how and when to re-use code and why, where the best shortcuts are and how to use them. AJAX as a term is a shortcut describing combined technologies. Referring to those technologies through the use of the shortcut is done for ease. Using the term without knowing what it is or how to use it is dumb. Everything gains a name. It’s easier than saying loops, functions and processes using the hypertext preprocessor (or whatever technology you’re working with at the time).

Just my two cents. Nicely written article, too.

By: Matt Foster

Matt Foster — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:43:24 +0000

Greetings,

Through best practices of a pure “Ajax service” I have
developed a manner for implementing history style behavior in Ajax
applications. It involves a new HTML Microformat and doesn’t require
polling, two features I thought were particularly appealing. If
you’re interested in a method for handling the infamous back/forward
buttons in Ajax applications the full article can be read here.

http://positionabsolute.net/blog/2007/07/javascript-history-service.php

Cheers,
Matt

By: To busy for this crap!

To busy for this crap! — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:15:14 +0000

You know… it’s guys like all of you here that make my day crap! Here I am doing a search for a solution on fixing the back button issue caused by using AJAX enabled pages (AJAX! AJAX! AJAX! AJAX!… oh… and AJAX!) and what do I get? One page of posts that’s 3 freakin’ miles long of people bitching about a word and not about the actual topic.

See what you made me do? You made me join you and now I’m bitchin’ about the bitchers!

I hate humans!

By: Kieran

Kieran — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:28:56 +0000

Hi,

Has anyone noticed that using the rshf in IE you see a loading bar in the status bar when navigating the o’reilly mail example (
http://shrinkster.com/i51 ). This seems to go against the ajax concept of not seeing any page refresh/loading?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks
Kieran
http://www.perryworld.com

By: bigduke

bigduke — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:46:12 +0000

i believe that “really simple history” has been in use by the backbase team for a long time now.

That explains how to tackle the back button woes … how about bookmarking ? Does Amass take care of that ?

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 04:54:40 +0000

Oops, you posted this awhile ago; Technorati just pickd it up so I thought it was new.

Brad

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 04:53:19 +0000

By the way, Kevin, thanks for pointing out the RSH library to your readers! If you have any ideas on how to make it easier to use or more powerful please shoot me an email at bkn3@columbia.edu

Best,
Brad

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 04:52:32 +0000

I created the Really Simple History and AMASS libraries, and I use the term AJAX. No, the term AJAX is not perfect, and if you dig too deeply into it you find that you don’t always need to use XML for remote communicaton or even use the XmlHttpRequest object (you can use a hidden iframe). However, the term AJAX has become a pretty good place-holder for referring to advanced web pages that are using a variety of technologies to advance web sites beyond simple, static pages, and that’s good enough for me.

Best,
Brad Neuberg

By: Jaffa The Cake

Jaffa The Cake — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:03:03 +0000

Exactly, I’ve conducted interviews where someone else looked through the initial batch of CVs and I helped with the telephone & face to face interviews. Hardly any of them knew as much as they claimed on their CVs. I found out that no work examples had been asked for at the application point. So basically, whoever put the most buzzwords on the CV got the phone interview, needless to say I was quite angry about this. For instance, Octal, you may not have got through to that interview because of your honesty.

I can see why my initial rant was misunderstood, because it was a rant and therefore more of a release for me than anything else :) sorry about that.

AJAX is a cowboy term, and is quickly being associated with the misuse of the technologies it represents. See for yourself, do a search for DHTML scripts on google, add a year and AJAX will be the same.

The cowboys read ‘AJAX’ in a forum and add it to their CVs because it’s the new buzzword. However, in this instance it’s a buzzword you can do without. By all means refer to AJAX in CVs and such, because you may have a cowboy interviewer. But you’ll do a lot better saying something like “Javascript & XML (sometimes refered to as AJAX)”, both situations are covered.