Comments on: WebConsole - Take command (line) with AJAX

by: Marco

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:45:18 +0000

Hi Stoyan,

This comment is just to let you know I've transformed my PHP / xajax presentation into an extensive blog posting. It includes all examples with sourcecode that I used during the presentation. I'm very interested in your comments!

You can get it all here:

http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2005/11/12/easy_ajax_for_the_masses_with_

Cheers!

Marco

by: Stoyan

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 12:50:10 +0000

Hi Nirmal,
I've never thought of passing extra parameters to the callback function, I assumed the responseText and responseXML would be enough. But you're right, it would be better if you could pass such parameters. I'm afraid you'll have to modify my code to suit your purposes, as it currently doesn't support this.
You can probably use "arguments" variable to pass a dynamic number of parameters. I mean something like:
function test(){
alert(arguments[0]);
}
test(1,2,3);

Another option is to add a forth parameter to makeHttpRequest that will be an array and just carry on this array in the call to the content function. The array would allow you to use as many parameters as you need.

In any event, check the second example in the article, because it's designed to be reusable. The first one that you quoted is more of a quick refresher. The second aims at making the request-making function (makeHttpRequest) agnostic of the content processing one (alertContents).

by: Nirmal Kumar Shukla

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 07:42:29 +0000

Hi Stoyan:
It is a very good work and to the point.
But i want to call alertContents in a slight different way.

http_request.onreadystatechange = alertContents;

Does it allow to pass, some arguments to alertContents()
like:
function makeRequest(url,one,two,three) {

http_request.onreadystatechange = alertContents(one,two,three);
http_request.open('GET', url, true);
http_request.send(null);

}

function alertContents(one,two,three) {
//some processing with these arguments
//one,two,three

}

by: Stoyan

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 02:57:29 +0000

If you allow me to quote Timon from my daughter's favourite Lion King:

that's crazy talk, crazy talk I'm tellin ya…

I'm sure you have more visitors than me, if you feel peeky and want to compare stats, visit this site with /stats appended to the domain name, I didn't bother to protect the stats for now.

by: Marco

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:30:21 +0000

Well thanks Stoyan, I'm flattered once again. You're one of the few I guess. I get so little visitors that I sometimes wonder why I'm doing it at all!

I'll let you know when my examples are online!

by: Stoyan

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:57:48 +0000

Woww, Marco, you'll have an AJAX/PHP talk, nice! Good luck with the presentation and I'll wait for after the talk when you find the time to translate it in English.
(And yeah, with the risk of repeating myself, your blog is a piece of art!)

Sathish, it's true it's a very dynamic area, good luck in your learning and experimenting and have fun

by: sathish

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 13:35:38 +0000

I am very eagar to learn to this new technology it vety interest one
it veryt fast and dynamic

by: Marco

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 19:49:22 +0000

I haven't seen the PEAR package yet to be honest. Will check it out!
However I did check out some other things and actually fiddled with it. I tried Prototype.js which is pure javascript but very powerful and easy to use with PHP. The live search and instant comment-previews on my blog were done with it. (they do need some tweaking though). I did the hardened-trackback thingy on my blog with the raw XmlHttpRequest object. It's all not that hard really but like I said, writing Javascript is a debugging hell and therefore too time consuming in my opinion.

If you haven't seen it you should really try xajax. It's the best available library for PHPers in my opinion. This weekend I prepared a presentation on Ajax and PHP which I'll deliver at a PHP conference November 10. I created all examples using xajax because of it's PHP-mindedness and it's extreme ease of use. It's completely OO too!

After November 10 I'll translate the whole presentation into English and make a lenghty post on my blog showcasing the four demo's I created. If you're interested in seeing what I did somewhat earlier feel free to leave me a mail. I just don't want to post it before the keynote that's all

by: Stoyan

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 19:07:57 +0000

Hey Marco, thanks!

Well, I'm not quite sure what your question was. If you're asking about the different AJAX libraries, I haven't really fiddled with any of them, so I have no first-hand experience, seems like you know much more than I do. I was curious about the way the XMLHTTP request works (who wasn't? after Gmail ), so I looked at the very basics.

Speaking of AJAX libs, have you looked at the PEAR package - HTML_Ajax? I'd be interested to hear your opinion.

by: Marco

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:11:00 +0000

That's a WAY cool article. respect!

It brings me to a question I'd like to ask you. Your article contains a LOT of Javascript. While I can write DOM Javascript very well I consider javascripting a tedious and often annoying job because it really sucks in the debugging department.

Most frameworks are very heavy on the javascript and very light on the PHP side. Prototype.js is cool and so are some other frameworks based on it. However there's xajax too. This is COMPLETELY PHP centric and not Javascript centric. It's still sort of young and it has it's limitations but I like the xajax approach much more than the write-miles-of-javascript-approach that many of the other frameworks have.

The only drawback is there seems to be little movement in xajax (looks almost dead). If it stays dead I'll probably pick it up myself or try to do a similar thing based on Prototype.js.

What do you think Stoyan?