GSvideoBar AJAX video thumbnail sidebar component from Google

Google has a really great way to add some pizzaz to web pages or blogs.

new GSvideoBar AJAX component from Google for video thumbnail sidebar:

The GSvideoBar Solution is a simple to use application of the
Google AJAX Search API that is designed to let you easily add
application and page controled video search and playback capabilities to your pages, sites, and blogs.

After basically just being a curiosity for almost a decade, desktop video publishing has moved from the realm of the possible - to that of the everyday, commonplace occurence.

I remember Steve Jobs saying back in the 1990s that desktop video editing/production would become just as popular as desktop publishing was in the 1980s.

Desktop publishing really did take off, and Apple was the first consumer computer company that positioned itself to be a player in it.

They had the first affordable laser printer, the first affordable windows/icon/mice/menus desktop user interface, and the first WYSIWYG word processor.

Put them together, you get desktop publishing.

Today, all iMacs include the IEEE.1394 (FireWire) digital media interface, an iSight camera built right into the bezel above the display, video editing and DVD-burning software, and high speed 802.11g wireless broadband-speed networking.

Put those together, and you get a lot of digital video - really quickly.

Technorati tags: google, blogging, video, seaerching, ajax, api, programming, javascript, tutorial

Flickr: Explore everyone's geotagged photos on a Map

Flickr now supports Geotagging.

Flickr: Explore everyone's geotagged photos on a Map

Makes sense.

Flickr has had tagging forever and Yahoo has had Geocoding for like a year. Yahoo bought Flickr, so they own it too.

They are simply de-normalizing their various product's feature sets. ;-)

What is kind of surprising is they did not go the Flash route that you might expect on a project like this.

I peaked under the hood. Not hard, just do a "View Source" command with your browser.

What that reveals is that the page is implemented using DHTML technologies (JavaScript+DOM API). They also seem to make mention of XMLHttpRequest so I am guessing they use AJAX-like technology.

I saw mention of JSON in the code and no mention of XSLT - so I think it is probably implemented with asych JSON over XMLHttpRequest call, and rendered using DHTML techniques.

Right-mouse clicking on any part of the page confirms that this is not a Flash-based site but a DHTML one.

Anyway, it seems pretty cool!

Technorati tags: ajax, javascript, dhtml, yahoo, flickr, geotagging, tagging, digital, photography, web2.0, socialweb, mapping

AJAX Hacks - pretty good book

There is a pretty good book available called AJAX Hacks. It is very up-to-date. It just came out in 2006 or maybe late 2005.

It has lots of examples of doing AJAX programming in JavaScript using HTML. It mentions some of the popular JavaScript DHTML libraries for doing extra fancy things that are commonplace in AJAX programs.

It also covers the AJAX integration features built into popular server-based web application programming frameworks. One well-known example is the Ruby on Rails framework for the Ruby programming language.

If you are going to write your own custom AJAX code in the browser then you should also learn JavaScript before you read this book. Or, at the very least, have a good JavaScript reference close at hand.

A really good one is JavaScript: The Definititive Reference (by Flanagan, published by O'Reilly). The 4th edition of it is kind of obsolete now, though - so be careful.

You want to get the 5th edition. The 5th edition will cover the particular JavaScript object used by all AJAX programs, the new features of the JavaScript language, and many other things.

The 5th edition is over 1000 pages.

Although, I do not think the JavaScript book today - I think it will be shipping by the beginning of September 2006. Amazon is accepting orders for it right now.

One thing that makes it especially attractive to order it from Amazon before it ships is that they knock about a third of the price. Check the price when you are shopping there and you will see what I mean.

If you plan on doing a ton of AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, and DOM programming - you will probably want these books by your side. They are both extremely useful and very clear.

defineWidget - JotSpot Wiki (dojo)

The Dojo team has cleverly defined their architecture in such a way that defineWidget can take HTML, SVG, and other renderer types when defining a new widget. So a widget developer can elect to support a couple different renderers for a component.

When a user sidles up to a web page using that component, Dojo can sniff what browser he is using to view it, assess its capabilities, and choose the right renderer to render that component in the best way possible.

Here is something from the Dojo wiki that helps clarify that a little. To really understand, go to its page, and read the whole page so you can get the context - and the examples.

defineWidget - JotSpot Wiki (dojo):

Widgets can have different versions for different renders. (In practical terms, this means that there can be an SVG version of a widget for Firefox, and a VML version for IE)

Technorati tags: dojo, svg, vml, web, component, programming, html

Brian McCallister

Already, AJAX has become super popular.

Ways of defining your own HTML/Javascript components (web page widgets) are coming along more slowly.

Dojo is a Javascript library that makes creating reusable, DHTML-aware components a lot easier to do. Its makers just streamlined the process of creating Dojo widgets way simpler than it used to be.

Brian McCallister:

There are quite a few good bare-bones introductions to Dojo widgets out there, but not a lot beyond the Hello World stuff. Here is a bit, as I find it and figure some of it out...

The recent 0.3 release added an amazingly convenient method for creating new widgets, dojo.widget.defineWidget, which I'll use for al my widget making -- it is just that much nicer =)

Technorati tags: dojo, html, ajax, component, dhtml, javascript

Many of the sites I am using are already AJAX

Websites like Amazon, the 43* sites (43 Things, 43 People, 43 Places, All Consuming, Lists of Bests), Digg, Yahoo, Google, and so forth have been AJAX for a pretty long time - looking back.

And it really has not been all that long since the first articles came out mentioning AJAX.


AJAX has caught on faster than most computing technologies I can recall, save HTML itself.

Part of the reason for that rapid adoption was the web was already dry tinder, just waiting for the spark that was AJAX.

People already wanted a fast, powerful, breathtaking, lightweight, easy-to-program, modeless GUI technology for web pages. Browsers already had the technology needed to pull it off too. It had been slumbering in them for years.

Flash, the way it grabs the CPU sometimes in a headlock certainly and makes bookmarking forms difficult - is not quite it, sometimes. Java applets, when they cause a delay in page loading or are difficult to weave into a page - are not quite it, sometimes. Regular HTML forms, the ultimate modal interface, sometimes are totally not it.


AJAX came along, and like Charlie in Charlie's Angels took them away from all that.

And the users?

They are happy!