The point is that this is not new, but based on hype from Gmail it's been rebranded to appear as new, and people are buying into it.
Exactly how is this a bad thing? So what if it was given a goofy name? The XMLHTTPRequest is extremely useful and its an open standard. It fills in where people were previously using proprietary technologies.
Firefox's adoption XmlHttpRequest didn't "enable" Google to use the technology.
Google's history shows doesn't wish to only write code for microsoft users. They didn't use xmlhttprequest when it was IE only. I personally would not have touched xmlhttprequest until I knew it could be used by other browsers. 90%(or is that 85% ?) isn't good enough.
The phrase "Dynamic HTML" pretty much sums up what AJAX is, which is nothing more than using Javascript to make server requests and modify the DOM. It's so annoying that for some reason, the press is acting like this is a new technology.
The interesting part is the first "A" in AJAX, its asynchronus meaning it doesn't require a comlete page refresh to retrieve data not already contained in a web page. This isn't new, its been around since IE 5.0. What's new is that browsers other than IE support xmlhttprequest object now. This has enabled companies like google to use the technology, thus creating a buzz.
I've never used XML. Rather, we should just be referring to the general sense of using either XMLHttpRequest/Iframes as "Ajax" to keep things simple for consumers.
IFrames are not required for AJAX.
All you need to do is have an xmlhttprequest object called by whatever event you like, it can then take the response and then somehow (usally div tag) change the contents of a web page. That's it. The use of Iframes is 100% optional.
Design in my opinion should be mostly irrelavent to the database its implemented on.
"Should" being the operative word. In practice, this just isn't the case.
For example, a unique ID for a primary key on a database could be implemented as a autonumber field in mysql, or a sequence in oracle. This changes the application using the database. What if that ID is the foreign key for child tables? Transactional support may be handled differently if the parent table's primary key is known before initiating the transaction.
In this case, if sequences were considered baseline database functionality, the particular database being used would be less relevant.
You are told what basically happens. Roland and company fight John Farson's army, everyone dies but Roland, the Horn of Eld is lost, etc. The rest of it is left to the imagination (which King assumes his readers have). I mean you are not exactly told how the hotel in The Shining came to be haunted.
I might be a little biased against the ending. I picked up part 5 not long after finally finishing Return of the King and its appendices. Tolkien was nothing if not thorough. I know they are totally different writers, but Stephen King did take quite a bit from tolkien's story.
King did explain that Roland was the sole survivor of the battle of Jericho Hill, but Rhea of the Coos was a major player in the story. And she just disappeared after tricking Roland in Gilead. We can't assume that she was even at Jericho Hill or hanging out with evil santa in the tower.
Sure she might have just decided to hide out and lay low, but after what she did to Roland, his vengenance should have been directed at her more than Walter, Farson, and the Crimson King combined.
Don't get me wrong; I still love the series, but book 4 was somewhat of a disappointment: waiting for years for the story to progress, and being treated to a history lesson instead. And everything after that felt somehow rushed and... cheap...
I remeber feeling that way when I stared reading book 4. I was realy digging the post-apocalyptic surreal world, then BAM, we're heading out to the old west. But the story of Roland with his buddies and Susand Delgado was pretty interesting so I really ended up liking the book a lot. After part 5, I wanted him to got back into flashback mode for the fall of Gilead, but instead we were treated to pages upon pages of new york and politics and susannah.
And I agree, the harry potter thing was way out of place to the point of making me kind of angry when I read it.
Another thing that just sort of had me asking "why?! why?!" was if that one kid at the end could make stuff he drew real how come he didn't fix Roland's hand?
Man, I'm glad I'm not the only one. This bugged me as well.
Don't get me wrong, I've read most of stephen king's books and he's still my favorite author. I'm psyched that he's part of creating these comics and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Roland's world.
For the most part I hope that Stephen King is doing this by his own volition, a desire to expand his genre to the more visual aspects.
That or he's feeling guilt for having his fans read 7 long books without resolving some basic plot lines. In the preface on one of the early books (3 or 4.. can't remember) he said he would dedicate more time to Roland's youth. I'd love to see a comic dealing with the fall of Gilead.
Don't get me wrong. It's my favorite series of books (and as a whole, my favorite story), beating out The Vampire Chronicles by a good margin.
After finishing wolves of the calla I would have agree about it being my favorite series of book. Part 6 really killed it for me though. It was a huge boring book that did very little for the massive plot. I like part 7 somewhat, good action and it kept me interested, but how can anyone not feel a little cheated with the ending?
Dark tower series is probably my second favorite after Lord or the Rings.
Same here. King at one time said part 5,6 or 7 would be a flashback like part 4 was. I was very dissapointed how it ended. The series started off so well and I even enjoyed part 5, but the last two were rushed. It was clear he lost interest.
WTF was the crimson king? What happened to Roland's dad? What happened to the witch?
I had a similar problem with fedora 3. Turned out that there was a volume bar on the gnome sound thing turned low by default. Wish I could tell you more details, but I can't remember what that app name was... It had a whole bunch of volume adjustments on it.
>>I'd love to believe that, but at the time that the MS solution was first made, MS had even more of a control over the browser market than they do now, really. Many of their proprietary nonsense things ended up on webpages, and there's little reason to believe this wouldn't either. I'm not sure if it had XML support, though.
Microsoft released Interent Explorer 5.0 in september 1998. This was the first version to have the XMLHttpRequest object.
AJAX was possible over seven years ago. That said, until firefox implemented it, I didn't even think about using it in web applications.
>>Was before computers were powerful enough to really take advantage, though.
How so? Parsing xml isn't anything special, and AJAX xml messages tend to be small anyways to overcome bandwith restrictions. And since xml needs to be well formed, the code using it doesn't need to be as forgiving as say, code to display random html.
The only reason (and good one, IMHO)that AJAX is gaining popularity recently is that the XMLHttpRequest javascript object is available in browsers other than IE and no longer proprietary to microsoft.
OpenOffice 2.0 comes with a database front end application like Access.
You can create a database with its small embedded hsqldb or connect to an external database like Mysql or postgres.
You'll need Sun's jvm for this stuff to work as well
Re:What's the point of these Q&A sessions?
on
Sid Meier Responds
·
· Score: 1
How about a poll to rate questions based on all highly moderated comments? Doesn't have to replace the existing poll, and would only add a couple days to the questions getting out to the interviewee.
Exaclty. This is the feature I've been anticipating. Is it already out? I thought it was coming with 5.5 Also, does the oracle shared lib still require a sqlnet client install complete with a tnsnames.ora? JDBC simply requires the.jar file in the classpath. All the low level TCP stuff is included
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they did.
Where? Firefox's xmlhttprequest implementation is older than google suggest and gmail.
The point is that this is not new, but based on hype from Gmail it's been rebranded to appear as new, and people are buying into it.
Exactly how is this a bad thing? So what if it was given a goofy name? The XMLHTTPRequest is extremely useful and its an open standard. It fills in where people were previously using proprietary technologies.
Firefox's adoption XmlHttpRequest didn't "enable" Google to use the technology.
Google's history shows doesn't wish to only write code for microsoft users. They didn't use xmlhttprequest when it was IE only.
I personally would not have touched xmlhttprequest until I knew it could be used by other browsers. 90%(or is that 85% ?) isn't good enough.
Why is it taking off where Java applets attempted similar things 10 years ago with great hooplah, and never really caught on?
Simple.
Its taking off because firefox can do it without any extra plugins.
The phrase "Dynamic HTML" pretty much sums up what AJAX is, which is nothing more than using Javascript to make server requests and modify the DOM. It's so annoying that for some reason, the press is acting like this is a new technology.
The interesting part is the first "A" in AJAX, its asynchronus meaning it doesn't require a comlete page refresh to retrieve data not already contained in a web page.
This isn't new, its been around since IE 5.0. What's new is that browsers other than IE support xmlhttprequest object now. This has enabled companies like google to use the technology, thus creating a buzz.
I've never used XML. Rather, we should just be referring to the general sense of using either XMLHttpRequest/Iframes as "Ajax" to keep things simple for consumers.
IFrames are not required for AJAX.
All you need to do is have an xmlhttprequest object called by whatever event you like, it can then take the response and then somehow (usally div tag) change the contents of a web page. That's it.
The use of Iframes is 100% optional.
Design in my opinion should be mostly irrelavent to the database its implemented on.
"Should" being the operative word.
In practice, this just isn't the case.
For example, a unique ID for a primary key on a database could be implemented as a autonumber field in mysql, or a sequence in oracle.
This changes the application using the database. What if that ID is the foreign key for child tables? Transactional support may be handled differently if the parent table's primary key is known before initiating the transaction.
In this case, if sequences were considered baseline database functionality, the particular database being used would be less relevant.
You are told what basically happens. Roland and company fight John Farson's army, everyone dies but Roland, the Horn of Eld is lost, etc. The rest of it is left to the imagination (which King assumes his readers have). I mean you are not exactly told how the hotel in The Shining came to be haunted.
I might be a little biased against the ending. I picked up part 5 not long after finally finishing Return of the King and its appendices. Tolkien was nothing if not thorough.
I know they are totally different writers, but Stephen King did take quite a bit from tolkien's story.
King did explain that Roland was the sole survivor of the battle of Jericho Hill, but Rhea of the Coos was a major player in the story. And she just disappeared after tricking Roland in Gilead.
We can't assume that she was even at Jericho Hill or hanging out with evil santa in the tower.
Sure she might have just decided to hide out and lay low, but after what she did to Roland, his vengenance should have been directed at her more than Walter, Farson, and the Crimson King combined.
Really good link. Too bad you put that up as an AC, its worth some karma :)
This should probably be included in the slashdot summary, much more information.
Don't get me wrong; I still love the series, but book 4 was somewhat of a disappointment: waiting for years for the story to progress, and being treated to a history lesson instead. And everything after that felt somehow rushed and... cheap...
I remeber feeling that way when I stared reading book 4. I was realy digging the post-apocalyptic surreal world, then BAM, we're heading out to the old west. But the story of Roland with his buddies and Susand Delgado was pretty interesting so I really ended up liking the book a lot.
After part 5, I wanted him to got back into flashback mode for the fall of Gilead, but instead we were treated to pages upon pages of new york and politics and susannah.
And I agree, the harry potter thing was way out of place to the point of making me kind of angry when I read it.
Another thing that just sort of had me asking "why?! why?!" was if that one kid at the end could make stuff he drew real how come he didn't fix Roland's hand?
Man, I'm glad I'm not the only one. This bugged me as well.
we shouldn't expect to learn all of the answers.
Of course not, just the major plot lines.
Don't get me wrong, I've read most of stephen king's books and he's still my favorite author.
I'm psyched that he's part of creating these comics and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Roland's world.
For the most part I hope that Stephen King is doing this by his own volition, a desire to expand his genre to the more visual aspects.
That or he's feeling guilt for having his fans read 7 long books without resolving some basic plot lines.
In the preface on one of the early books (3 or 4.. can't remember) he said he would dedicate more time to Roland's youth.
I'd love to see a comic dealing with the fall of Gilead.
Don't get me wrong. It's my favorite series of books (and as a whole, my favorite story), beating out The Vampire Chronicles by a good margin.
After finishing wolves of the calla I would have agree about it being my favorite series of book. Part 6 really killed it for me though. It was a huge boring book that did very little for the massive plot.
I like part 7 somewhat, good action and it kept me interested, but how can anyone not feel a little cheated with the ending?
Dark tower series is probably my second favorite after Lord or the Rings.
Same here.
King at one time said part 5,6 or 7 would be a flashback like part 4 was.
I was very dissapointed how it ended. The series started off so well and I even enjoyed part 5, but the last two were rushed. It was clear he lost interest.
WTF was the crimson king? What happened to Roland's dad? What happened to the witch?
I had a similar problem with fedora 3. Turned out that there was a volume bar on the gnome sound thing turned low by default.
Wish I could tell you more details, but I can't remember what that app name was... It had a whole bunch of volume adjustments on it.
First rule of slashdot. We do not talk about slashdot.
Second rule...
We do not about games on platforms other than windows.
BTW, 4 of the 36 +5 modded comments for this interview were about platforms other than windows.
>>I'd love to believe that, but at the time that the MS solution was first made, MS had even more of a control over the browser market than they do now, really. Many of their proprietary nonsense things ended up on webpages, and there's little reason to believe this wouldn't either. I'm not sure if it had XML support, though.
Microsoft released Interent Explorer 5.0 in september 1998. This was the first version to have the XMLHttpRequest object.
AJAX was possible over seven years ago.
That said, until firefox implemented it, I didn't even think about using it in web applications.
>>Was before computers were powerful enough to really take advantage, though.
How so?
Parsing xml isn't anything special, and AJAX xml messages tend to be small anyways to overcome bandwith restrictions. And since xml needs to be well formed, the code using it doesn't need to be as forgiving as say, code to display random html.
The only reason (and good one, IMHO)that AJAX is gaining popularity recently is that the XMLHttpRequest javascript object is available in browsers other than IE and no longer proprietary to microsoft.
d'oh!
Web-Frontends
My bad.
OpenOffice 2.0 comes with a database front end application like Access.
You can create a database with its small embedded hsqldb or connect to an external database like Mysql or postgres.
You'll need Sun's jvm for this stuff to work as well
How about a poll to rate questions based on all highly moderated comments? Doesn't have to replace the existing poll, and would only add a couple days to the questions getting out to the interviewee.
5th largest city in the us :)
was really just making the point about the ratios of the languages in question.
sqlclient sucks to install on most distros I've tried.
The new instant-client thing helps a little.
Exaclty. This is the feature I've been anticipating. Is it already out? I thought it was coming with 5.5 .jar file in the classpath. All the low level TCP stuff is included
Also, does the oracle shared lib still require a sqlnet client install complete with a tnsnames.ora?
JDBC simply requires the