…or ‘the web as an application’.
Creating a distractionless environment is getting harder with the latest browsers. When creating or browsing normal web pages, I would hate it if a site stripped my browser. In certain circumstances, like internal web based applications, I’m finding it more and more necessary. Keep reading to learn how I do it now and what I see for the future… Continue reading
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The conference
Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.
I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
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The hotel
The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!
Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.
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Just a couple more weeks to the West Wind Web Connection conference in Mesa, Arizona. As with years past, the WC conference is right before the Southwest Fox conference. I can’t wait! I’ve talked to most of the attendees on the WC forums, and a few by phone, over the last few years. It will be great to finally meet them in person. I’ll be participating this year during the “show and tell” portion of the conference. I’ve built almost 50 apps now with jQuery and the Visual Foxpro/Web connection bundle. My wife Sarah is excited too. This will be her first time on a commercial airliner, ever. She is currently 13 weeks pregnant (due date is 04/06/08) with our next child, so now is a good time to travel and take a vacation before it is to late. We’re bringing lots of barf bags, should be exciting!
I get asked a lot, especially on the Web Connect forum and jQuery mailing list, about Ajax (not AJAX, thank you) file uploads. The XHR object in javascript cannot access file uploads, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t give your users an Ajax-like experience. Here are some options and their corresponding back end languages.
Using Ajax in your website makes you buzzword compliant these days (OMG teh Web 2.0!?!), but once the hype passes I think everyone will agree then when used properly, it can greatly enhance the user experience.