Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged javascript, ajax

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How does a web page interact with a server to parse a dynamic JSON file?

If you’re only dealing with 60 records there’s no need to add a full database. I’ve actually hand coded a 50 record JSON file before and it was fine- use an editor with good JSON support (I like Sublime Text 2) and it’s pretty easy to hand write.

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How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page?

This can only be done using JavaScript. You use XMLHttpRequest to pull in new information from the server (also known as Ajax—most people use a JavaScript library such as jQuery to handle this) and then use the HTML5 history API, in particular the pushState method, to update the URL.

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Why do browsers allow cross-domain JavaScript to execute but not XMLHttpRequests?

It’s called the Same Origin Policy, and it’s principally about intranets. Imagine you have a URL http://intranet.corp/top-secret-...—and you then visit http://evil.example.com/ . If cross domain XHR was allowed the evil site could suck that secret document off your intranet without you realising.

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flXHR. I was looking for something like this recently, glad to see it exists. flXHR is a drop-in replacement for regular XMLHttpRequest which uses an invisible Flash shim to allow cross-domain calls to be made, taking advantage of the Flash crossdomain.xml security model. # 26th November 2009, 12:52 pm

Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer. dynaTrace Ajax looks like an awesome tool. For once, Internet Explorer has a development tool that other browsers can be jealous of. # 18th November 2009, 8:06 am

Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It’s horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it’s far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team. # 8th October 2009, 5:52 pm

breaking links. Mike complains about sites such as Twitter and WordPress.com which mess around with Ajax and links and hence breaks the ability to command-click to open a new tab in Safari (and Chrome). I just realised that I’ve subconsciously retrained myself to right click and select “open in new tab” to avoid that exact issue. # 8th October 2009, 8:26 am

Announcing Alice and Wonderland. Continuing the RabbitMQ “stuff to do with rabbits” naming convention, Alice is a RESTful interface to RabbitMQ which exposes information about vhosts/queues/users/exchanges/etc as JSON. Wonderland is a web UI for RabbitMQ implemented as a pure Ajax application which calls Alice. # 17th July 2009, 9:12 am

Building Fast Client-side Searches. Flickr now lazily loads your entire contact list in to memory for auto-completion. Extensive benchmarking found that a control character delimited string was the fastest option for shipping thousands of contacts around as quickly as possible. # 19th March 2009, 3:35 pm

AJAX APIs Playground. Ferociously useful collection of executable and editable example code for all(?) of Google’s JavaScript APIs, including Google Maps and the increasingly interesting Visualization API. # 22nd January 2009, 6:38 pm

Sloppy—the slow proxy. Java Web Start GUI application which runs a proxy to the site of your choice simulating lower connection speeds—great for testing how well your ajax holds up under poor network conditions. # 13th January 2009, 4:17 pm

A Snapshot of The Yahoo! Photos Beta (from 2006). Scott Schiller shares an internal retrospective on the Yahoo! Photos interface from 2006, which was years ahead of its time (they started building it before the term Ajax had even been coined). The material on memory management and event delegation is particularly interesting. # 12th January 2009, 10:21 pm

jQuery history plugin. I used this plugin to add back button support to a small Ajax app today, with great results. I tried it a while ago and it didn’t work in Safari, but someone has updated it since and now it works perfectly. # 7th November 2008, 5:32 pm

CSSHttpRequest (via) Devious cross-domain Ajax hack that uses CSS for transport (@import rules with data URIs, but it still works in IE). Similar to JSONP but safer, since JSONP can cause arbitrary JavaScript to execute. # 23rd October 2008, 6:25 pm

When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and notes from my talk on web application security at @media Ajax last Tuesday. # 20th September 2008, 4:16 pm

When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and (other people’s) notes from my presentation at @media Ajax on Tuesday. # 17th September 2008, 11:18 pm

Google Maps now shows photos and Wikipedia articles. Click the “More...” button. My first thought was “how do they get so many photo markers on the map?”—Firebug shows that they’re generating tiles on the server containing multiple photo markers, then when you click on one an Ajax call checks which photo is in that particular spot. # 14th May 2008, 7:10 pm

Reading binary files using Ajax. There’s a simple trick for Firefox, and (amazingly) you can get IE to play along using a function written in VBScript. # 22nd April 2008, 7:02 pm

Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction. # 9th January 2008, 11:57 pm

$.comet (via) The first Comet (with Bayeux) plugin I’ve seen for jQuery—currently only handles long-polling over XMLHttpRequest, but still a promising start. # 9th January 2008, 8:31 am

Why we switched to Jetty. Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo!) are using Jetty for Comet. It sounds like they are using Bayeux as well. # 8th January 2008, 5:12 am

ExtInfoWindow 1.0: Ajax powered, CSS customization. Finally, a semi-official way of creating customised info windows for the Google Maps API. You lose the default shadow but gain the ability to style the entire info window using CSS. # 15th December 2007, 12:22 pm

Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery. # 14th December 2007, 2:44 pm

The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today. Absolutely the best summary I’ve seen of all of the current Comet techniques in one place. # 11th December 2007, 1:13 pm

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet? # 16th November 2007, 1:19 am

google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later. # 14th November 2007, 5:18 pm

Comet Daily. New regularly updated site covering Comet, the Ajax-like umbrella term for JavaScript server-push techniques. Already a bunch of great stuff on there. # 7th November 2007, 10:53 am

How to make Ajax work for you. Slides from my three hour Ajax tutorial, presented at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin on Monday. # 7th November 2007, 10:35 am

SproutCore (via) MVC JavaScript framework used to build the new .Mac Web Gallery application. # 7th August 2007, 11:35 pm

jQuery Taconite Plugin. Lets you serialize jQuery DOM manipulation commands as an XML document for retrieval via Ajax. # 2nd July 2007, 6:29 pm