AJAX

AJAX, the new almighty web 2.0 buzzword, time to figure out what it’s all about. I’m checking it out for myself and I like a lot of what I see so far. Certain things seem to be easier to create in Flash, but if you stick to the prototype framework and use effects libraries like moo.fx and script.aculo.us you can really create some powerful GUIs without too much pain. It can produce some really light-weight files and integrates well with other web technologies. Here are my semester projects.

HW 1
Here are my first, somewhat lame, attempts at understanding javascript on the web.

Assign. 1 – Make an eyeball grow!

Test 2 – Trying to understand inheritance in javascript

Test 3 – This script slightly augments my homepage – www.karlchannell.com

HW 2
ClipMix – Draggable bits of video that can be mixed & matched into different non-rectangular video forms. It seems to work the most reliably in Safari, a little clunky.

HW 3
ImageLoader – This calls an XML file that’s created by querying a MySQL database. Every time a new image is uploaded javascript call is made to load up the latest file. It still needs tweeking, mainly an image removal button. I currently disabled the update button for security reasons.

HW 4
HomeMap – Took quick look at the Google Maps API and it’s pretty sweet. I whipped this up in a few minutes just to get a super quick overview of what is possible with Google Maps, I hope to dig deeper soon…

MagicHand – My first experiment with the canvas tag; my floating hand is based on an oscillating cos & sin wave. It’s really amazing what is possible with this, basically anything you can do with flash is possible with canvas.

AJAX <> Processing GUI
Beta version 1

Final Project – Street Art Spotter
This simply allows the upload of images to a server, which then also updates the image info to a database. My php script then extracts the database info into XML which the javascript parses to update the map markers. The map is thanks to the Google maps API.