Posts Tagged ‘Ajax’

Awesome tool for Ajax Development

Thursday, May 27th, 2010





While building apps that utilize ajax calls, one of the last steps that I do is finding a little loading graphic that will work with the site’s color pallet. This is the little spinning circle, or blinking dots, or moving bar that looks neat while the content is loading. Sometimes it’s hard to find the perfect one that doesn’t have a bunch of gif noise (all that anti-aliasing edge color) and they end up looking cheap or gross. Well, yesterday I found an awesome tool.

Ajaxload.info is a site where you can choose a loading graphic, enter your sites background color (or choose transparent) the loader foreground color, and press generate. This site will take those parameters, and spit out an animated gif with the correct colors and animation. AMAZING! The images that the site generates are totally free to use, however and wherever, and are compressed well to be web-friendly. This is a great tool that saves a ton of time, as animating gifs is one of the most tedious things in web development.

Thanks Ajaxload.info!


Utilizing Google AJAX APIs CDN

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

jqueryWhen using JavaScript libraries to perform a function on a public-facing web site, the traditional way of referencing your library is using something like this:

<script src="/js/jQuery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Here, we are loading a jQuery library in to the HTML header for future use on the web page.  This means each time you want to use the jQuery library (or any other JavaScript library) on your new web site, you must download the latest version, upload it to your server, and then reference it here.  This technique works well enough, but lets explore a better way to perform this same library load.  We’ll do it in a way which will help us with version control, decreased latency, and better caching. How? By utilizing a CDN (content delivery network).

Below is an example on how to go about using the Google AJAX Libraries CDN, using jQuery as the library to load. (more…)