I’m finally on holiday after having a pretty brutal year at uni!

I’ve bitten off a fair amount of stuff to do over the summer though. I’m currently nursing my interest in web development by helping to make the website for the unofficial ECS TF2 server. It’s quite nostalgic really, I haven’t done any proper web based stuff since school. I’m quite surprised how much things have changed, for the better thankfully.

A mock-up of my design idea can be found here for those that care. Feel free to vote for a banner. The palette is based entirely on one I found at Fabry Design but I got fed up with constantly using the eyedropper tool to find the colour values so I made a HTML version. That and I wanted to show off.

I’ve recently discovered jQuery which allows one to “write less, do more” and it really does deliver. I’ve used it on my design idea to make the palette and that vote box. It handles a surprisingly large about of stuff too, ranging from simple CSS manipulation through animations and up to AJAX. With a good enough backend it would be very easy to write an internet application using jQuery instead of Flash or Java.

AJAX is something I’ve wanted to try for a while now because it allows you to update a web page without needing to refresh it. If anyone has ever used WordPress then you’re probably familiar with the auto-save draft feature when writing a post. If it didn’t use AJAX your page history would fill up with bullshit.

So what exactly is AJAX? Like most acronyms in technology it has a scary name: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It’s asynchronous because you can handle an AJAX transaction at any point you like and it won’t refresh the page. You write the front-end code in JavaScript and typically communicate using XML. So, as usual, its bark is worse than its bite.

Using my ECS design prototype as an example: I use AJAX to submit votes and build that form but without refreshing the page. Every five seconds a new request is issued to the server to update the form values. This happens without any user interaction, or asynchronously. There are plenty of other uses for this kind of thing, the Facebook instant messenger probably uses it. I never log Facebook so I don’t know.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) however is pretty bulky. I won’t go into it here because I can’t be bothered, but trust me that it is. Thankfully AJAX is not bound to XML despite it being present in its name, instead we can choose to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which is much smaller. It’s supported natively by JavaScript which means it’s fast and easy to turn handle.

I intend to use what I’ve talked about here to gradually remake this site. My Experimental page will hopefully start filling up with stuff until I have enough to assemble a new website.

Word.