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If you’re following the whole Ajax thing, chances are, you visit Ajaxian on a regular basis - and if you don’t, you really should be. Ben and Dion (and now Rob) are great and they seem to find just about everything interesting that’s happening in the Ajax space. I should also add, they’re really fantastic guys too, if you ever have a chance to see them present, take it!

Back in late August, they launched a podcast. Now, I’ll admit, I was late to this whole iPod thing but I have to tell you, I find podcasts really interesting. Heck, they *almost* make me wish for a Californian style commute so I could actually keep up with all the great podcasts out there. I’m currently “reading” an audiobook and I have to tell you, I find myself gravitating to podcasts…

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to Ben and Dion for discussing Taconite (oh and Ben, it’s pronounced like tackle, not taco - though one guy did post something to SourceForge saying Tuesday was Taco Night at his house! No biggie, I suppose only us Minnesooootans would know that one.) The whole podcast is worth listening to but if you just want the dirt on Taconite, its just under 6 minutes into the podcast. They were also kind enough to mention our book, Foundations of Ajax!

Ryan and I are really flattered that you guys find the approach so appealing! And yes, we aren’t big fans of innerHTML - sorry, we’ve just been burned bad. Yeah, I know, XHR isn’t a standard…but it’s better than iframes! Yes, innerHTML makes tables a lot harder and frankly, that’s one of the best uses of Ajax that we’ve found. One of these days I’m going to write about something I built at my former employer called maintainable table - but that’s a story for another night.

I know it’s odd, but we actually tried to stay near the W3C’s Load and Save spec. We actually think someday…maybe…this will actually be implemented. Personally, I think it would really help with overall adoption of Ajax if we could guarantee it would work, as desired, across browsers. Ahh, who am I kidding…that won’t happen anytime soon. Still, we liked a lot of the ideas in there so, rather than invent our own, we just borrowed theirs.

A little latter (around minute 12) in the podcast, Ben made a fantastic point about the hack-ability of Ajax while discussing the jsquery toolkit. I couldn’t agree more - I want to keep an open mind too but I have serious concerns about any application that is opening up their business data like that. While I’m sure there are some excellent uses, this style feels like a nail gun or a circular saw - in the hands of a professional, these tools can do amazing things. However when someone with less skill uses them…people lose fingers.

Thanks again guys, we really appreciate the kind words! By the way, I’m really enjoying Pragmatic Ajax. Like Foundations, Prag Ajax is focussed and very readable. I know some people think a book needs to be 700 pages long to be valuable but in my experience, I rarely finish a book that size. Truth be told, I think small books that get to the point without a lot of extraneous material are far more useful to the reader. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have a ton of free time to read through a book that tries to be all things to all audiences. This is part of why I am so excited about Pragmatic Fridays!

I tell you, this whole beta book idea is just great! This is the second book I’ve purchased this way (yes, I laid out my own money so don’t think I’m biased by a free copy) and I expect to do it more often. Pragmatic Ajax has some great material, heck the chapter on Google Maps is worth the price of admission! I’ve come to expect a lot out of books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf and I can tell you that this book lives up to that reputation. Great work guys!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Ajax, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.