Free as in Time

A day or two ago, a colleague pointed out to me that PostedJobs.ca was pretty thoroughly busted. After a moment of thinking, it occurred to me that I hadn’t done any pagination of the jobs lists, and over time they’d simply gotten too big to grab and display in one gulp. Oops. I mean, I knew it’d be a problem… I just didn’t expect it so soon.

Bruce Williams’ blog has many nuggets of awesome. Example: Rails Views: Avoiding AJAX Faux Pas.

1. You will always indicate when a remote action is occuring. Show a progress indicator; spinners are common these days, but use whatever makes sense. And don’t be fooled into thinking the action occurs so fast no indicator is needed—it may seem nearly instantaneous on your development server (with just you accessing it), but who knows what the future will hold?
2. You will always stop the progress indicator when the action is complete. An ever-spinning progress indicator [...]
   

Get your JRuby here.

My hope is that this project will start to short-circuit the sorts of things coming from the Ruby and Ruby on Rails naysayers.

In related news, here’s the last in a series of articles on Ruby vs. Java Myths.

From Linux Journal: “Ajax can become complex as far as implementation, but the concept is quite simple.” Hey, that’s just like me!

For a simple intro to Ajax, check out the LJ article Ajax Simplified. It’s a rather bare-bones approach, which has much to recommend it. Ajax, it turns out, is also like an ogre: it has layers, and this introduction is pretty close to the innermost of those layers.

This WordPress template makes use of a pretty slick effect. When you click on items in the sub-header, the content slides down to reveal menu items: YGo Silhouette – 2 column wordpress theme with cool ajax slider

Like I said, pretty slick. Maybe also a feature in search of a solid use case. Maybe.