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Manipulate Your TV Listings with TiVo+Ajax

Posted by timothy on from the decline-of-western-civ dept.

scrapeYurShoos writes "As posted on PVRBlog: another cool use for Ajax (or whatever you want to call it), this one culls the Now Playing xml file residing on your TiVo and transforms it using xsl into a pretty webpage or a Pie Chart."

7 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. How about a link by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Informative

    to a pie chart that has a key so we know what the colors mean.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  2. Re:Ajax? by elid · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read this

  3. Re:Ajax? by josh3736 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Ajax is basically a buzzword (meaning 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML') to describe something that's been done years before but now popularized by the likes of Google and Amazon's A9. Really nothing to see here.

    On the other hand, Ajax does sound like an interesting meat byproduct.

  4. Re:Cool, but not complete by The_Rippa · · Score: 4, Informative

    ahh, it has a limit of returning 128 shows.

    Here's a version of the script someone fixed: http://anonymous123.home.comcast.net/nowPlaying.xh tml

  5. Good Point by serutan · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm glad somebody pointed this out. "Ajax" is just one guy's acronym ("Asynchronous JavaScript + XML") for a technique he didn't invent that's been around for years, first as the xmlHttpRequest ActiveX control for IE and now supported natively by Mozilla. Basically, instead of switching from one web page to another, you have a single page that sits in the browser accepting user input, getting data from a server and repainting portions of itself, just like a standard application. No need to maintain session state because the user stays on that page for the whole session.

    When I first found out about xmlHttpRequest back around 1998 I got all excited. It seemed like what the web had been waiting for. I was really surprised when Asp.Net returned to more of a refresh-refresh-refresh model with an elaborate state maintenance scheme.

    I find designing pages with xmlHttpRequest intensely fun and more like good old fashioned application programming. Do yourself a favor and try it out.

    1. Re:Good Point by serutan · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah well, this guy's site sort of ticks me off. It's informative, but he presents it way too much like something he invented, which he didn't. Naming something is usually the prerogative of its creator or discoverer, not just some guy who thinks it's cool.

      I guess it would be hard to make a good acronym out of "Somebody else's stuff plus somebody else's other stuff that I drew some diagrams of."

  6. naming by alpha_foobar · · Score: 2, Informative

    We decided to call it 'Jasc' at work.

    Javascript API for Server Communication. AJAX seemed to avoid most of the uses of the various technologies the are included in this umbrella.

    For example, the communications do not have to be asynchronous and doesn't actually need to have anything to do with XML.

    Actually the engine isn't even required to be JavaScript, IE uses ActiveX objects and I have seen an example of an implementation using Java in Opera. However for our API, we are wrapping the engine in a JS object and only implementing in IE and Gecko engined browsers.