AXXT - Web development and more

Busby SEO Challenge

Dragan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:18:17 +0000

Here is an interesting find : Busby SEO Challenge.

Friend of mine is participating in challenge where you are competing with other participants on who will score no.1 position on Google for "Busby SEO Challenge" phrase, and award is quite nice too - $5000

Firefox3 download day side effects - getfirebug.com is down

Dragan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:01:12 +0000

Getfirebug.com is currently unavailable from Europe.
It seams that FF3 is not compatible with latest stable version of firebug (1.0) but you must use some of the beta versions.

At least, it seams that firebug has a lot of users, ant that certainly is a good thing.

Erlang, the future of Web Apps?

Dragan — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:40:02 +0000

There is a lot of buzz around Erlang these days, and there is a reason to it - Erlang has native solutions for most common problem of todays large web apps:

-Erlang is distributed
-Thus, Erlang is easy to scale
-Erlang comes with built in mnesia database, which can also be distributed
(and it even comes with transaction support)

Erlang is process based language, and programmers from the world of sequential languages must change they mind set rapidly in order to fully understand and take advantage of Erlang.

On the other hand, Erlang is fairly simple language with just a few built in functions an it could take you just a few days to get a grip on it.

and if you dont trust me, you should probably trust guys at Google. Here is one of the topics form this years Google's scalability conference in Seattle:

Scalable Wikipedia with Erlang by Thorsten Schuett, Zuse Institute Berlin

Abstract:

Global online services at Amazon, eBay, Myspace, YouTube, or Google serve millions of customers with tens of thousands of servers located throughout the world. At this scale, components fail continuously and it is difficult to maintain a consistent state while hiding failures from the application.

Peer-to-peer protocols provide availability by replicating services among peers, but they are mostly limited to write-once/read-many data sharing. To extend them beyond the typical file sharing, the support of fast transactions on distributed hash tables (DHTs) is an important yet missing feature.

We will present a distributed key/value store based on a DHT that supports consistent writes. Our system comprises three layers:

* a DHT layer for scalable, reliable access to replicated data,
* a transaction layer to ensure data consistency in the face of concurrent write operations,
* an application layer with an extremely high access rate.

For the application layer, we selected a distributed, scalable Wiki with full transaction support. We will show that our Wiki outperforms the public Wikipedia in terms of served page requests per second and we will discuss how the development of the distributed code benefited from the use of Erlang.

Also Apache built their new document based database called Couch DB on top of Erlang, and Facebook implemented their online chat system in Erlang, so if you think about it, there must be something good about that language.
So why not learn it?

Applying ajax to our applications

Dragan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:08:59 +0000

Is there a better way to start a week?
:)

Quote of the day - Andy Budd on Usability

Dragan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:35:07 +0000

Andy Budd on CSS, usability and stuff like that:

But I do think that in this world where I've got a PS3 at home that performs live texture-mapping rendering in 3D, on the fly, why we can't get a browser that can render rounded corners on a box in 2008. You know, we should all have jet packs here! A rounded corner box or multiple background images shouldn't be rocket science.

Rest of the article here..

Fancy javascript intro in 55 lines of code

Dragan — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:25:32 +0000

Tonight I was supposed to do some boring database related stuff, but instead I got some ideas about
playing with table cells, random access and opacity.

Result is quite interesting, and it shows true power of Javascript. I suppose it would take lot more trouble to do something similar in flash, and if even if it could be done, this method gives you lot more control.
(For example you can add specific onmouse effects/events on some table cells )

So, here it is, 55 linse of javascript, no framework used:

Demo:
http://dragan.yourtree.org/projects/javascript-intro/

UPDATE

and now something even more crazy than our last example:
really nice mouse effect in just 18 lines.
(using prototype though )

Demo:
http://dragan.yourtree.org/projects/js-mouse-grid/

I'm starting to wonder, is it possible to make, lets say 400x400 "display" made from 1x1 table cells and make an javascript demo, like they did in the 90's...
You know, plasmas, rotating cubes, etc..

rop off - part 2

Dragan — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:25:12 +0000

few months ago we wrote about guys that stole our design.

now, someone stole our entire copy

us:

DevPulse is web development and consulting agency based in Belgrade specialized to offer you highly professional web solutions and consulting services on building your Internet identity and your web applications.
Over last few years we had successfully worked with with clients in our country and abroad and gain serious amount of experience in managing medium to large web applications, interface design, rich Internet applications (RIA) and Ajax, search engine optimization (SEO) and building custom CMS solutions.

We can also offer you services in visual identity building (graphic and logo design) and Internet marketing

http://devpulse.net/

them:

Hyper Max is web development and consulting agency specialized to offer you highly professional web solutions and consulting services on building your Internet identity and your web applications.

Over last few years we had successfully worked with clients in our country and abroad and gain serious amount of experience in managing medium to large web applications, interface design, rich Internet applications (RIA) and PHP, Asp. net, search engine optimization (SEO), building custom CMS solutions and open source customizations .

We can also offer you services in visual identity...

http://www.hypermaxsolutions.com

come on guys, is it really that hard to sit down and write couple lines of original text?

Give you input fields Facebook look

Dragan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:34:27 +0000

I found one really interesting piece of code on ajaxian.

I really like this example, it shows true power of ajax in just few lines, an also it runs very smooth and fast.

here is the author page
http://devthought.com/textboxlist-meets-autocompletion/

and the demo
http://devthought.com/wp-content/articles/autocompletelist/test.html

MGraph update - multiple graphs

Dragan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:43:14 +0000

MGraph - Ajax based graph, updated to v0.96

I've got a letter today from James who asked me how to draw multiple values on the same graph.
That would been too much complicated, because that kind of solution must involve some kind of overlay.

Instead I decided to enable second best solution (as suggested by James), and that is - multiple graphs

New features

Added Option to draw two or more graphs
code modified to be more user friendly, and up to date with modern standards

I'll try to improve MGraph as much as I can, so if you have any new ideas - I'm listening.

Google Chart API Prototype plugin

Dragan — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:47:39 +0000

Wrapper in less than 50 lines

Few days ago find out about Google chart api and i thought it might be a good idea to write Prototype plugin, so here it is:

Project page

Version 0.4 alpha
Download GoogleChartAPI.prototype.js