Friday, March 27, 2009

Ajax in the AIR

Adobe AIR introduces a whole new subject when talking about Ajax. I’ve decided to create an new website dedicated to developing Adobe AIR applications, by way of Air Tutorials. It’ll cover both HTML with JavScript and Flex (mxml and ActionScript). Snippet manager is the first sample application available, which was built using Flex. There will be a range of tutorials showing how this application was built.

At the time of writing this, the site has very little content. But I am working on it. Please send in your ideas. You can find out more at: www.air-tutorial.com

The site will introduce a balanced opinion of Adobe AIR, it is not affiliated with Adobe in any form.

Update: The first tutorial is available - it covers the installation and configuration of the Air Sdk.

Concurrent Connections with Ajax

Concurrent Connections with Ajax

Here is an quick example of an ajaxed application - you have your main page (lets say index.htm) and when it loads it calls in various content using ajax (lets say we call in navigation.php, products.php and basket.php). Ok so navigation.php, and products.php load fine but basket.php fails!! Hmmm, what a pain - why did it fail to load you ask. Simple!! most browsers can only handle 2 ajax calls at one time and because all 3 of them are called on the index.htm page load - then one probably will fail.

Ok, so how do we get around this limitation? well one way I’ve found that works pretty well is to put delay in the ajax calls ” window.setTimeout(”ajaxcall()”, 400); ” for example. You could have this in the tag or just simply enter the javascript at the end of the page (body onload would probably be the best option).

I’d be interested to hear other possible solutions.