Pebble gets Ajax'd

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:12:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, at QCon, Joe Walker and I started hacking some code into Pebble to provide comment previews via Ajax using DWR. We got quite some way with this and I've been finishing it off over the past few days. For good measure, I've thrown in some script.aculo.us. This is my first "real" bit of Ajax work and I've learnt a couple of important lessons.

It's really easy to break your web application for browsers that have JavaScript disabled.
JavaScript (the language) actually does scare me.
DWR and script.aculo.us make a fantastic combination.

I'm sure there will be a few tweaks here and there but it seems to work well. This will be in the next release so take a look and let me know what you think.

QCon London : day 5

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:25:00 GMT

Friday was a morning keynote-free day and it was straight into the conference sessions. I stuck to the Ajax track throughout the day and it was certainly the right decision. I learnt *so* much about Ajax that I didn't know before and I've finally been truely motiviated to take my knowledge to the next level.

First was Dave Crane's Ajax and design patterns : Do we need a client tier?, which showed how you can use some of JavaScript's dynamic language features to implement some of the common design patterns you typically associate with a client tier. I have to say, JavaScript is much more powerful than I ever thought but it scares the cr*p out of me! Oh my word, some of the things Dave showed were just crazy.

In a change of direction, Bruce Johnson's Google Web Toolkit: What, Why, and How was a nice introduction to GWT. I've heard a lot about this on the Java Posse podcast, but haven't played with it myself. From a Java developer perspective, being able to write cool Ajax apps using Java code is very compelling. Couple this with a neat little standalone environment in which you can *debug* your Ajax application and you have to wonder whether you need to write JavaScript ever again. Of course, the thing that Bruce pointed out was that GWT isn't a widget library - it's a toolkit for building Ajax based webapps in Java. For widgets and graphical effects, you need to look at something else.

And that something else might be Dojo. Eugene Lazutkin presented Modern web applications with Dojo: the cutting edge. Dojo is a JavaScript framework that includes a whole host of utilities for JavaScript development, in addition to a widget library for simplifying the more graphical aspects of your application. Dojo sounds quite impressive but, with a lack of actual demos, I was left wanting to see what Dojo can actually do.

Thankfully, Thomas Fuchs' Prototype and script.aculo.us: Spending the weekends at home again session satisifed my need to actually see some funky effects in action. Prototype and script.aculo.us are two JavaScript frameworks that provide utility functions and widgets respectively. I've heard the names of these frameworks before but have always resisted taking a look. I don't know why, but I think I just expected that they would be incredibly hard to get into for some reason. Having now played with script.aculo.us in conjuction with some DWR integration that I'm doing with Pebble, I wonder why I didn't look at this stuff before. It's very easy to get started and can become quite addictive. There's a really useful guide to some of the effects you can achieve with script.aculo.us here and I recommend taking a look if you're starting out. I think that this was one of my favourite presentations - interesting content and some nice eye candy to really motivate and enthuse people to go and try it out.

A final keynote session wrapped up the QCon London 2007 conference, and this was a panel with Diana Larsen, Jeff Sutherland, Martin Fowler, Dan North and Erik Meijer. I really enjoyed listening to these five people discuss some of the issues they come up against, most of which had an agile slant. Examples include people claiming to do agile but not (something that I've written about before) and teams being more pragmatic about choosing a development process. Also, there was some really interesting discussion about something close to my heart at the moment - whether you can continue with a technical career rather than moving into management. Somebody made a very good point that our industry will lose mentors if the really good technical people move away from what they are good at and that mentors are essential for growing other people's careers. Makes perfect sense to me and I think I'll be blogging about this topic in the near future when I've thought through some other stuff.

So that was QCon London 2007 and I was kind of glad it was over to be honest. It was an excellent event but I was shattered by the end of Friday. That's the end of my day by day coverage (I'm on holiday at the moment, so better late than never!) but I have some general thoughts about the event that I'll post next week. Until then...

QCon London : day 1

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:36:00 GMT

QCon London started today with the first of two days worth of tutorials. Mine, entitled "What can JMX do for you?" was one of the first in the schedule, starting at 9am. Turnout was good and I had a great time talking about and demonstrating JMX. We covered the following topics.

What is JMX?
How do you start using JMX?
Enhanced monitoring with notifications
Remote JMX
Use cases for enterprise applications
Programmatic access to MBeans
JMX and Spring
Extending JConsole (with the Java 6 JConsole API)
A case study

The feedback I got after the session was good and I'm really pleased that people got something out of it. If you were there, hopefully you've been infected too. ;-)

After lunch I attended Joe Walker's "Ajax-enable your Java application with DWR", which was a great overview of DWR and the sort of things you can do with it. After the session, Joe and I spent a couple of hours starting to AJAXify Pebble and you'll see the result of our efforts in the next release.

I've had a really good day at QCon and I'm looking forward to tomorrow where I get to choose between tutorials covering Groovy, agile leadership, agile development and EBJ 3.0 persistence. Hmmm ... too much choice for this time of the evening.

Simon Brown - ajax tag

Pebble gets Ajax'd

QCon London : day 5

QCon London : day 1