Author Archive

DWR Hooks and Dojo Dialogs

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

It’s common to use Dojo to talk to a Java server using DWR. Here’s a handy hint for how to add a nice “loading” feature that uses a Dojo widget to display the progress made by a DWR call.

DWR has had a useLoadingMessage() function since version 1.0, but there have always been some problems with it – it mimics the early GMail loading message, which is OK if you like that style, but not otherwise. It can get confused if there are multiple actions outstanding, and there is no way to tell it to go away if you need to continue interacting with the page. We try with DWR to focus on remoting and not widgets, so we have not spent a lot of time on a fancy loading message widget.

Enter the Dijit Dialog which can solve all of these problems in addition to being accessible, themeable, localizable and generally more full of goodness.

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Posted in DWR, Dojo, ajax | 1 Comment

Accessibility Experiment

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Just back from @media Ajax with a few ideas buzzing around. One based on this comic:

comic about foreignizing a website

It's patently absurd. And yet it's what we do with accessibility all the time, and in some ways the differences between someone with a visual impairment and someone with dexterity difficulties could be greater than the differences between a Spanish and Italian speaker.

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Posted in Conferences, News, ajax | 10 Comments

Comet and Java

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

One of the difficulties implementing Comet on Java is the lack of any acknowledgement in the current Servlet spec (v2.5) that any HTTP connection may be anything other than short-lived. Unlike many of the other components in the JavaEE stack, servlets are ubiquitous so we don't really have a choice to use an alternative.

Servlet version 3.0 is in the works, several of the people that blog at Comet Daily are on the Servlet spec expert group and want to see this oversight fixed, but it will be a while before the spec is done, and even longer before we can rely on it’s support everywhere.

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Posted in Cometd, DWR, Open Source | No Comments

JFokus 2008 Wrap-up

Friday, February 8th, 2008

I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations. I came back wishing that I wasn’t on such a tight schedule so that I could have attended more talks.

Kirk Pepperdine was there, and despite not hearing his talk we had quite a bit of debate about it (we met due to a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel by the conference center). Maybe his talk turned out differently, but it sounded as though he was going to be ringing the warning bell for big databases. The argument essentially went: transactions don’t scale over multiple CPUs (something Amazon etc. have already discovered) and since we’re all going multi-core, we need to look to ways of doing things that are not transactional. Kirk’s answer was object databases.

I did a tutorial on DWR, and updated the ‘Case for the Open Web’ talk that I did with Alex at TAE. I managed to add 50% more material and finished early to boot. I guess with 2 people talking there’s a lot more banter.

One of my contentions was that monopolies are bad for the web, no matter who holds them.

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Posted in Conferences, DWR, News, Open Source | No Comments