Contents tagged with AJAX
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File Download Progress Bar
Yesterday I added a progress bar to my ASP.NET page for downloading YouTube videos. There was no visual indication that the download was taking place because the page just appeared to be taking a long time to load. I would have to open the download file location to verify that something was being downloaded.
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I Pounce On The Pownce API
The microblogging site http://www.pownce.com/ has opened to the general public so I decided to give their API a try. But the main point of this blog post is to dispute the assertion that JSON is "easy for humans to read and write". It is not easy to read! JSON is a mess of curly braces, brackets, and quoted strings that is even more difficult to read than XML. I had considerable trouble working with the JSON data that Pownce provides because it seems to be nonstandard and requires the use of array indices which aren't usually needed. At first I tried to determine the data's object model by loading the XML version into XML Spy and finding the XPaths for a value. This was only slightly useful. Then I found a JSON Viewer on CodePlex which proved to be extremely helpful.
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Amazon Wish List In JSON
Today I explored some alternative JavaScript coding methods to make it easier to dynamically create DOM elements. I used jQuery and the jQuery Plugin, FlyDOM, to work with the Amazon web service API. I bought the book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan from the Computer Books Direct club which is closing and selling books cheap. I have not read the book yet but there is a chapter on converting Amazon data directly into JSON using XSLT (hmm, interesting) and it actually covers several other APIs and the technology behind mashups. There was some mention of Amazon wish lists which attracted my attention because I use wish lists to save books that I come across which I may want to buy some day. In other words, this is personal data that I am actually interested in.
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JavaScript Libraries
I've been working a lot with JavaScript lately so I decided to check out all the JavaScript libraries that are available. Many of these libraries have useful utility methods and modules for JSON and AJAX. There are six libraries that I intend to explore; the Microsoft AJAX Client Library (I need to see what was added in 3.5), the Prototype JavaScript Framework, the Dojo Toolkit, MochiKit, and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), and jQuery.
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JSON Syntax Checker Tool
Yesterday I found a useful tool for checking the syntax of JavaScript Object Notation strings: http://www.raboof.com/Projects/JsonChecker/ I needed that because I'm trying to create a widget for Stickam that will work in my compiled help file. I'm using my xml2json generic handler to convert XML to JSON and apparently it generated some invalid JSON. This tool helped me to narrow down the location of the syntax error.
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JavaScript Object Notation For Cross Domain Web Requests
In attempting to use the Microsoft AJAX Library 1.0 in a MSHelp2 collection (to be viewed in the Microsoft Document Explorer) I ran into the same origin policy (SOP) restrictions on the XMLHttpRequest object. I cannot make web service data requests to another server from a page in compiled help without getting a JavaScript error message: "Access is denied".
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Book Review: Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials
by Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea
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Web Parts With AJAX
I'm very enthusiastic about web parts but I've been a bit disappointed by the quality of the demonstrations and examples that are provided. Usually you are shown how to drop a calendar control into a web part zone and then there is some discussion of how the web part manager works. My general complaint with sample code is that it is either too simple and does not accomplish any task that you would find useful, or it is too complicated and you won't want to tackle it. I have had to struggle to create some web part examples that accomplish something interesting.