SpoolCast: Ajax: Then and Now with Jeremy Keith Recorded: June 6th, 2008. Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer Duration: 40m | File size: 21 MB [ Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes. This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] [ Text Transcript Available ] This week, Ajax design expert Jeremy Keith joins us from Brighton, England. Jeremy is the technical lead at Clearleft, a leading design consultancy in the UK. He’s the author of the popular books, “DOM scripting” and “Bulletproof Ajax.” Ajax has really evolved since the term was coined. The technologies that we use to make responsive web pages and applications continue to evolve as well. Jeremy has his fingers on the pulse of these changes, and has a lot to tell us about the when, the where, and the why of using Ajax. Talking with Jeremy was fascinating and, during the interview, he offered several juicy nuggets about using Ajax effectively. For example, he suggested that we think twice about if our business logic should be in the client-side environment. He proposed the server should be doing the heavy lifting, since this is a controlled environment. The interactivity should appear within the browser, so the interactions appear quick and seamless. His rationale is interesting: Since browsers are diverse and quickly changing environments, Jeremy recommends we use them primarily for display and interaction, and we should resist the urge to process too much data with JavaScript. Instead, we should move the data to the server for processing. It may increase your bandwidth or server load, but both of these, he argues, are good problems to have—it means your app is popular! Of course, you’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear the other wisdom that Jeremy has about using Ajax in production environments. [For even more wisdom, you'll want to attend Jeremy's full-day seminar, Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and Usable Ajax Solutions , at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.] We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How are you deploying Ajax to improve your experience? Let us know what you think in the comments! Less

The third podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. The 29-minute podcast covers five patterns. As with the previous podcast, there is reason for concern about the audio quality herein. Firstly, three patterns on DOM population - taking server response data and displaying it or storing it in the DOM: XML Data Island Retain XML responses as “XML Data Islands”, nodes within the HTML DOM. Browser-Side XSLT Apply XSLT to convert XML Messages into XHTML. Browser-Side Templating Produce browser-side templates and call on a suitable browser-side framework to render them as HTML. The second group of patterns (representing a different chapter in the Ajax Design Patterns book) are a couple of generic Javascript patterns to make the code more maintainable and portable: Server-Side Code Generation Automatically generate HTML and Javascript from server-side code. Cross-Browser Component Create cross-browser components, allowing programmers to reuse them without regard for browser compatibility. Download Standard Podcast Less