Advanced Ajax (Kindle Edition)

For those interested: Advanced Ajax (Kindle Edition) apparently went up on Amazon. I haven't met anyone yet who has a Kindle, but I imagine someone out there does! Hopefully lots of Ajax developers...

Vienna + PHP (source code) + iUI

Source posted! BSD License. From the README:

You'll need to do a few things to get this working:

1. Move the extracted vienna directory to /Library/WebServer/Documents
2. Download iUI (http://code.google.com/p/iui/) and put the main iui directory into the extracted vienna/ directory
3a. Setup a cron job to copy ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna/messages.db to the extracted vienna/ directory
3b. For the adventurous: mv ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna/messages.db to the extracted vienna/ directory and sym-link it back to ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna/
4. Make sure to enable web sharing
5. Go to (your computer's name).local/vienna

Book review up on Agile Ajax

Book review: Advanced Ajax by Lauriat (Part 1 of 2) went up earlier today (also linked to from Ajaxian), and so far Brian Dillard (RIA Evangelist @ pathfinder and project lead for Really Simple History) seems to like it:

Because Ajax moves so much application logic from the server to the client, it forces many developers to master a wider range of web technologies than ever before. To work effectively on Ajax projects, front-end developers have to concern themselves with database performance, business logic and other server-side concerns. Back-end and middleware developers, meanwhile, have to make friends with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and a wide range of browsers. Sure, it's possible to develop Ajax apps in a siloed team environment. But it's not the easiest way, and it rarely provides the strongest results.

Shawn M. Lauriat's "Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices" (Prentice Hall, 2008, 360p) bridges the gap between developers with exclusive client- or server-side skills. By exploring tools, technologies and best practices for every layer of the Ajax programming model, this solid new programming manual promises to plug the holes in any developer's resume. Lauriat's tops-to-tails approach offers something for almost any developer, but it also guarantees most readers will find some sections remedial. As this two-part review will demonstrate, that's not necessarily a liability.

Read the full review

Vienna + PHP + iUI

So, sick of not having the ability to feed my XML addiction when away from my machine, I took an hour this morning and hacked together a quick'n'dirty iPhone/iPod Touch UI for my Vienna database using MacOS 10.5's standard PHP (with SQLite PDO), iui, and my Vienna database (stored in sqlite3). I gave it read-only access to the database, partly so I wouldn't have to worry about screwing it up, partly because I didn't feel like bothering just yet. I just need to add a "Mark Read" button to make an Ajax call.

I'll ask the Vienna devs if they'd like a copy of the source to toy with and generally improve, since I blatantly stole reused Joe Hewitt's design and markup for iui-enabled Digg.

Note: though my uploaded demo does pull from a copied Vienna database, it does not pull from a live one, since I wrote the code to run on a desktop MacOS 10.5 machine and not a Linux server. I then just made a bookmark on my iPod Touch to my iMac on the local network.