Website upgrades…
Posted by rickb on September 14th, 2009
Well, I’ve upgraded my FreeBSD server and everything is back in order, including a new version of WordPress.
And, I’ve reinstated the comments mechanism (restored the DB table) and installed the reCaptcha mechanism. So far, so good – spam appears to be throttled, but not completely eliminated.
At least it’s manageable.
On AJAX
I’m kind of mystified why so many sites haven’t incorporated AJAX – a lot of really big sites still do a full page refresh when something is updated. I can’t attribute it to ignorance, so it must be … dare I say … laziness?
Some notes on my approach to AJAX:
- A lot of the AJAX libraries descend into baroque-ness, normally pointed toward updating parts of the page with HTML snippets. The MS implementation seems to be the worst offender. This seems like a bad idea, to me.
- To maintain presentation/logic separation we like so much in architecture circles, you don’t want to be passing UI stuff over the wire – the only possible exception is if you’re creating all of your UI on the wire (which strikes me as prime fodder for loading up the server, so I don’t like to do that, anyway…)
- JSON is the lingua-franca of AJAX, not HTML. Better to pass JSON-encoded data back and forth and let the server and the client handle their ends appropriately. I’m a big fan of off-loading as much as possible to the client, anyway. Stuff like forms validation should be done – at least preliminarily – at the client. The client should re-arrange itself based on JSON responses and data.
- You never know what the next new big thing is. You’re client might be written in JS, now, but tomorrow’s need may likely be Flash, Silverlight, or who knows what? Passing back and forth snippets of JSON and keeping the semantics simple doesn’t break the back-end, or entail hoops trying to support multiple types of clients.
- There’s nothing better than updating just part of a page. Full page refreshes are jarring.
I’m sure there are exceptions (there always are), but that’s the way things appear to this author, as of this writing.