JSON

Twice a mon­th, we re­vis­it some of our read­ers’ fa­vorite posts from through­out the his­to­ry of Nettuts+. Implementing AJAX tech­nol­o­gy can be a hit or miss thing. Do it well and you’ll have users rav­ing over the slick­ness it pro­vides to the gen­er­al user ex­pe­ri­ence, while, if you mess it up, you’ll be at the re­ceiv­ing end of their wrath. Here are 24 tips to guide through the pro­cess of im­ple­ment­ing AJAX tech­nol­o­gy with­in your web ap­pli­ca­tion. 1. Understand What it All Means First up, you (...)

I spend a lot of my life at the com­mand line and rarely use a plat­form other than lin­ux, and I’d like to share some of the com­mands that make my life easier while I’m look­ing at that flash­ing prompt. These in­clude man, the com­mand to rule all com­mands, tools to find things, view files, and to find changes be­tween files as well as how to work with re­mote files. Man Man is the Manual Page, and holds all the in­struc­tions for all the var­i­ous com­mands and how to con­trol them. Personally I often (...)

It seems that some­one is al­ways go­ing around the Internet and mak­ing triv­ial things a com­pe­ti­tion. Thus, when Twitter and Foursquare both made moves to re­move XML sup­port from their APIs, mil­lions of web de­vel­op­ers re­joiced. Why such ju­bi­la­tion? Is there re­al­ly a need to cel­e­brate such a triv­ial, and log­i­cal, move? Norman Walsh and James Clark re­al­ly cov­ered the bas­es on this one, so I’ll spare the more in­trin­sic de­tails that you can find at their blogs here, and here, re­spec­tive­ly. (...)

It seems that some­one is al­ways go­ing around the Internet and mak­ing triv­ial things a com­pe­ti­tion. Thus, when Twitter and Foursquare both made moves to re­move XML sup­port from their APIs, mil­lions of web de­vel­op­ers re­joiced. Why such ju­bi­la­tion? Is there re­al­ly a need to cel­e­brate such a triv­ial, and log­i­cal, move? Norman Walsh and James Clark re­al­ly cov­ered the bas­es on this one, so I’ll spare the more in­trin­sic de­tails that you can find at their blogs here, and here, re­spec­tive­ly. (...)

In 2008, a small com­pa­ny named Varien, based in Los Angeles, qui­et­ly re­leased an open source ecom­merce plat­form to the world. Ma­gen­to, as it came to be known as, quick­ly gained trac­tion with web de­vel­op­ers wish­ing to move on from the days of osCom­merce and Zen Cart to a more pro­fes­sion­al and ro­bust sys­tem. Magento has earned a rep­u­ta­tion of be­ing flex­i­ble and pow­er­ful, while re­main­ing some­what of a mys­tery to de­vel­op­ers. Documentation for the plat­form was, and still is, scarce. In this (...)

It’s a great time for JavaScript. Not on­ly is it be­com­ing a much more re­spect­ed lan­guage, but it’s al­so grow­ing in leaps and bounds – both in pop­u­lar­i­ty and fea­tures. As more browsers be­gin to im­ple­ment the fea­tures of the ECMAScript 5th edi­tion stan­dard, JavaScript be­comes an even more pow­er­ful plat­form for you to de­vel­op on. In this tu­to­ri­al, we’ll talk about the new meth­ods that are avail­able to you. What is ECMAScript 5? ECMAScript is the of­fi­cial name of what we all call JavaScript. (...)

HTML5 is here to turn the web from a web of hacks in­to a web of ap­pli­ca­tions – and we are well on the way to this goal. The com­ing year will be to­tal­ly and ut­ter­ly awe­some if you are ex­cit­ed about web tech­nolo­gies. This year the HTML5 rev­o­lu­tion start­ed and there is no stop­ping it. For the first time all the browser ven­dors are ral­ly­ing to­geth­er to make a tech­nol­o­gy work. The new browser war is fought over im­ple­men­ta­tion of the HTML5 stan­dard and not over ran­dom ad­di­tions. We live in (...)

At least in terms of cool Web stuff, JSON re­placed XML long ago. But the sto­ry keeps trick­ling down. Semi-piv­otal events ap­pear to be re­cent moves by Twitter and Foursquare to re­move XML sup­port from their Web APIs, set­tling sole­ly on JSON. In the wake, no less than XML crew mem­ber James Clark has tak­en a slight­ly more ap­pre­cia­tive stance on JSON. XML grew too com­plex, he ad­mits. It doesn’t work well with pro­gram­ming lan­guage data struc­tures, he con­cedes. Still, the oc­ca­sion is al­so an (...)

With a blog it’s great get­ting com­ments, but as any blog­ger need to re­al­ize, there are other chan­nels that peo­ple like to ex­press their re­ac­tions in to – espe­cial­ly Twitter. Background Therefore, I want­ed a nice way to im­ple­ment re­ac­tions on Twitter to my blog posts, so ev­ery­one read­ing could see it all in the same con­text. Some time ago (may­be a year) I found the BackType Connect plug­in for WordPress. All good and well, till it stopped work­ing a few months ago. I went through all of my (...)

Businesses have an ex­traor­di­nary amount of on­line data to look after. Between Web an­a­lyt­ics, so­cial me­dia met­rics, email sub­scribers, CRM, cus­tomer sup­port stats and pro­ject man­age­ment, com­pa­nies have at least half a dozen dash­boards to log in­to and pull data from. Geckoboard is one Web ap­pli­ca­tion that at­tempts to sim­pli­fy this bur­geon­ing over­abun­dance of busi­ness in­for­ma­tion. It's a drag-and-drop dash­board that al­lows you to plug in var­i­ous sources of data and dis­play them on a (...)

One thing that is re­al­ly frus­trat­ing to deal with is lo­cal­iza­tion. There is noth­ing fun­ny about lo­cal­iz­ing text from your ap­pli­ca­tion. But this is a nec­es­sary step when you want to go for very a broad mar­ket in mul­ti­ple lan­guages. So while your there, why not hav­ing a lo­cal­iza­tion in­fras­truc­ture in all your front-end. Most PHP frame­works and JS wid­get li­braries can now be easi­ly cus­tomized as far as lo­cal­iza­tion is con­cerned. However your bound to have some string mes­sages in your (...)

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the life of the Web. It’s used ev­ery time you trans­fer a doc­u­ment, or make an AJAX re­quest. But HTTP is a rel­a­tive un­known among web de­vel­op­ers. This in­tro­duc­tion will demon­strate how the set of de­sign prin­ci­ples, known as REST, un­der­pin HTTP, and al­low you to em­brace its fullest pow­er by build­ing in­ter­faces which can be used from al­most any de­vice or op­er­at­ing sys­tem. Why REST REST is a sim­ple way to or­ga­nize in­ter­ac­tions be­tween in­de­pen­dent (...)

The GitHub Project It might have tak­en a while, but two weeks ago I fi­nal­ly got in­to GitHub. For those not fa­mil­iar, GitHub is a site fo­cused on the ver­sion con­trol sys­tem Git, and al­lows. It’s not the on­ly place that you can get host­ed Git repos­i­to­ries from (e.g. Beanstalk), but it does have a much more open-source friend­ly en­vi­ron­ment. It’s no co­in­ci­dence that their tagline is “So­cial Coding”. As part of my ori­en­ta­tion to GitHub, I want­ed to con­tribute some­thing to an ex­ist­ing pro­ject. As (...)

Today, JavaScript take a lead­ing place when it comes to client side pro­gram­ming and is used by pro­fes­sion­als and web de­vel­op­ers all over the world. JavaScript is a pow­er­ful lan­guage with many ad­vanced fea­tures and frame­works like jQuery, YUI, SproutCore and Cappuccino. But it has cer­tain dis­ad­van­tages that JavaScript is not the same in all browsers and it lim­its and ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of a web­site. But the­se fac­tors should not lim­it the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of this won­der­ful lan­guage. Working with (...)

We here­by an­nounce the im­me­di­ate avail­abil­i­ty of MooTools More 1.3.0.1. We have up­dat­ed all of MooTools More’s code to work with the re­cent­ly re­leased Core 1.3 with­out 1.2 com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Besides the API up­date, 1.3 im­proves sta­bil­i­ty and in­tro­duces some awe­some new fea­tures. Awesome new fea­tures? What awe­some new fea­tures? Events.Pseudos, wait, this isn’t hap­pen­ing! MooTools Core 1.3 in­cludes our new se­lec­tor engine Slick. One of Slick’s com­po­nents is Slick.Parser. Slick.Parser pars­es a (...)

You have one drop­down menu, and de­pend­ing on the user’s choice in that one, a sec­ond drop­down gets filled with choic­es. Let’s cov­er three dif­fer­ent ways you can go about that. View Demo Download FilesThe Markup For our ex­am­ple, the markup will al­ways be the same, just two sim­ple se­lect ele­ments. The first one has three op­tions. The first just in­forms the user to se­lect an op­tion, and the next two are ac­tu­al choic­es. The sec­ond se­lect on­ly has one op­tion telling the user to please pick from (...)

Here are the slides of my FrontTrends pre­sen­ta­tion. Mostly new ma­te­ri­al about why we need SMS mes­sages for trans­fer­ring JSON, web servers over Bluetooth, why we don't need app stores, and other mo­bile web ideas. Overal ver­dict: fun con­fer­ence! If it runs again in 2011, go there. And they plan an event called Falsy Values, too.

jQuery 1.4.3 is now out! This is the third mi­nor re­lease on top of jQuery 1.4, fix­ing some bugs and land­ing some nice im­prove­ments. I would like to thank the fol­low­ing com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers that pro­vid­ed patch­es and in­put for this re­lease: Anton M., Justin Meyer, Colin Snover, Ryan Tenney, Louis-Rémi Babé, David Petersen, Rick Waldron, Dave Reed, John-David Dalton, tem­p01, Heungsub Lee, J. Ryan Stinnett, Robert Katic, Juriy Zaytsev, James Burke, Jeffery To, Carl Fürstenberg, Jacob Wright, Jeff (...)

Right now I’m in Düsseldorf with Vodafone, test­ing the 15th mo­bile WebKit I found: LG WebKit. I’ll head home this after­noon, and after that I have two more trips to go be­fore this year is up. Next week I’ll be in Warsaw for Front Trends where I will speak about JSON over SMS and other cool mo­bile op­por­tu­ni­ties. I will al­so vis­it friends there. Then in the sec­ond week of November I’ll head to the UK on­ce more. I will at­tend Full Frontal on Friday 12th, and it seems like­ly I’ll be around London (...)

When de­vel­op­ing a Web App, there are some steps on the func­tion­al and tech­no­log­i­cal side you can (and must) con­sid­er be­fore start­ing. Know Your Ground Spend some time re­search­ing: are there al­ter­na­tives that would do the same thing you want to de­vel­op? What are their flaws? Who’s their au­di­ence? Is there ex­clu­sive con­tent you can of­fer? What’s your val­ue propo­si­tion com­pared to your com­peti­tors? Here are some di­rec­to­ries that will help you out: Apple WebApps page Feedmyapp – A di­rec­to­ry (...)