Practical Ajax - Enhancing The User Experience

Ajax can be a double-edged sword of sorts. If properly done our users should really have little or no clue that any 'magic' has happened. If overdone (or implemented needlessly - a phenomenon I like to call 'Because I Can...' or 'BIC') our users can be overwhelmed, and/or confused. One of the end goals of implementing an Ajax solution is to give our users an enhanced experience with our application - or at the very least keep them from being annoyed by the experience.

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Charlie Gets His OO On

Wanted to point folks to a new series by Charlie Griefer where he documents the beginning of his journey to OO enlightenment.

Check out the first two posts.

gettin my OO on
going OO (part 1)

For someone who's on the last turn of the first lap on the OO journey myself I can relate to a lot of Charlie's initial feelings. It took me several jumps into the pool before I decided that the water wasn't all that bad. Now I'm happily swimming, but like all things it's a constant learning experience.

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Persistent Application Settings In Model-Glue

My next stumbling block on my journey is the creation and persistence of application level data. Specifically the DSN for my application. Don't worry, when I get over these initial stumbling blocks I'm sure everything will run a lot smoother, but I keep sharing these items for a simple reason. I think these little things are the kind of things that trip up a lot of folks when trying to adopt new concepts and frameworks. I myself have let little things like this discourage me and I move on to things that are familiar and comfortable and forget all about the learning that I had done.

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Following Up On My Bean Confusion

A few follow-ups from yesterday's post. First off, Brian noted that his generator will recognize char(35), assume a UUID and generate the code accordingly. This worked perfectly and is definitely appropriate as Brian pointed out to me because since UUID's are fixed length and do not require unicode support.

Another error on my part in that post was pointing out that MG is stricter with datatypes then CF. This is not true. I was passing the entire userBean to the saveuser() function in my service when all I really needed was to pass the fields themselves (which I accomplished by using the beans getMemento() function) as an argument collection. I'm assuming that is an appropriate use of that function since it returns a struct containing each value. Therefore Model-Glue was trying to evaluate my component as a string which obviously don't work ;)

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