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Domain: blueshoes.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to blueshoes.org.

Comments · 5

  1. Re:"Library", are you kidding me? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Yahoo! Releases OSS Ajax and Design Tools

    "Library", are you kidding me?

    Indeed. Most of the posters obviously didn't do much investigation, or are not that familiar with AJAX development. This is the same stuff you've been able to get elsewhere for a LONG time. The Blueshoes and ActiveWidget collections are a lot more useful, albeit not entirely free.

    To be honest, I'm consistently frustrated by the status of OSS code with regard to the DHTML components necessary to support open source RIA technology.

    It's because the market is still young. For right now there's money to be made in DHTML controls. As long as that's true, programmers aren't going to be giving stuff away. (Hell, I've got my stash of super-secret components, and I'm willing to bet that you do too.) Once components become more commonplace, OSS libraries will begin appearing.

  2. Re:Hype, Hype, Hype by ashitaka · · Score: 1 · on Why Microsoft and Google are Cleaning Up With AJAX

    You're missing a couple of things:

    1) No need to install your heavy app on every desktop that needs it with all the joys of rollout and maintenance.

    2) There is a rapidly increasing set of backend AJAX components that implement all the regular application controls. For example take a look at Blueshoes.

  3. Re:Hype, Hype, Hype by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1 · on Why Microsoft and Google are Cleaning Up With AJAX

    And there's really very little here that couldn't have been done 3-5 years ago - browsers had the same javascript support, SOAP existed, and people knew you could make a request from within Javascript.

    Precisely. As I said in another post, the XMLHttpRequest is just icing on the cake.

    I've always thought that was part of why people didn't do this before - amount of coding needed to implement a simple app is vastly more than with something like .NET or QT. Is that not true?

    It is true. However, the real reason why it hasn't been done before is that Netscape 4 held onto enough market share to really gum up the works. As long as you needed to support these people, you could use full DOM technologies in your web pages.

    Are there AJAX development kits

    There are several out there, though most are immature. I have two in my library. (One for games, one for Desktop widgets.) BlueShoes has some nice stuff, for example.

    And what about the problems of implementing cross-browser Java-script? Has that been simplified?

    Yes! No! Sort of!

    If you follow the DOM standard, you're 95% of the way there. The last part that can really frustrate you is that Microsoft doesn't support addEventListener() from the DOM Events Standard. However, if you're smart you can patch objects system-wide to have this method under IE. The implementation merely calls IE's custom "attachEvent()" call. The two are similar enough to interoperate.

  4. Re:Not really new, but interesting by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1 · on Check Boxes and Radio Buttons Conquered by DHTML
    As far as I know, this IS new. I've certainly never seen checkboxes and radio buttons (non-Flash) styled like this before

    Try again. I (and many others) have been doing checkboxes, radio buttons, and even select dropdowns in pure CSS and JavaScript for awhile. I actually have an internally deployed application that does this, and I checked out several existing JS Libraries before writing my own. Go here for some good examples.

    I try to keep up with that kind of thing.

    Obviously not as well as you think.

    I'm not that well versed in ECMAScript or the DOM but are your suggestions accessible like what he's created? In that they would be able to be manipulated with tab and the space bar?

    Yes. To obtain the tabbing, you'd still need to wrap the checkbox in an anchor, but this can be generated on the fly. He uses an "OnKeyPress" to capture the spacebar events, so that can easily be replaced with
    anchor.onkeypress = function(e) {
    toggleCheckbox(newCheckbox, e.keyCode, 'StyledCheckbox'+checkboxIndex+');
    };
    Same results, but it's more dynamic.

    As I said, he hasn't done anything *new* here. His invention is really just a tutorial on how to be backward compatible while still providing fancy new DHTML controls. Such DOM walking schemes are in common usage today (ever see those pages that suddenly pop up hotlinks over key words while you're viewing them?), but the industry has begun to move away from concerning themselves with Netscape 4 era browsers.

    Of course, if you need a checkbox, most sites still use plain old checkboxes. The only reason to replace them is if you need a web app on the level of GMail, in which case a lot more things are likely to break than just the DHTMLS checkboxes.
  5. Blue Shoes? by Szaman2 · · Score: 1 · on OSS Web-based File Management?

    BlueShoes has this interesting app called web file manager. Essentially it creates an explorer like session within your browser. It relies heavily on javascript and stuff...