All posts tagged ‘wiki’

File Under: Ajax
Feb
16
2010

Ajax for Beginners

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JavaScript has had the XMLHttpRequest object for almost a decade now, but it really only started getting wide attention in 2004. All this attention was mostly due to some showoff web applications that made every developer who saw them think, “I want my site to do that!” But it also has to do with the spiffy, spiffy name given to it by the folks at AdaptivePath, who named this asynchronized application Ajax. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

A few high-profile Google applications in particular made a splash with Ajax: Maps and Gmail were first. It also powers some of the core functionality in the user interface of the ever-so-popular photo sharing site Flickr. By now, Ajax has become integral to the fabric of the web, especially in the era of real-time applications like Twitter, Buzz and Wave (all of which use Ajax extensively in their webapp front ends, for the record). Ajax may also lay claim to being the first JavaScript object with its own fan website. Date.com doesn’t count, although I did have a scintillating chat with a lady there once about the getTimeZoneoffset method.

Continue Reading “Ajax for Beginners” »
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File Under: HTML, Web Standards
Feb
15
2010

Make an HTML Document

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HTML is the lingua franca of the web. It’s a simple, universal mark-up language that allows web publishers to create complex pages of text and images that can be viewed by anyone else on the web, regardless of what kind of computer or browser is being used.

Despite what you might have heard, you don’t need any special software to create an HTML page; all you need is a word processor (such as SimpleText, BBEdit, or Microsoft Word) and a working knowledge of HTML. And lucky for all of us, basic HTML is dead easy.

It’s All About the Tags

HTML is just a series of tags that are integrated into a text document. They’re a lot like stage directions — silently telling the browser what to do, and what props to use. Continue Reading “Make an HTML Document” »

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Action

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Action is a Form attribute that communicates with the common gateway interface (CGI) program to process.

For example, if you entered “bananas” to the following form: 

<form action="../processor.cgi">

Please process this:

    <input name=food><br>



    <input type=submit>

</form>

The HTML form would send the input “bananas” to the cgi script. To the cgi script, the action would look like: ../processor.cgi?food=bananas

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Apache

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Apache is a freely available, and highly popular, open-source web server.

Originally, Apache was designed for Unix. Now versions are available for most operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux. There are also numerous add-ons and tailored versions of the server using the Apache module API. The name Apache comes from its origins as a series of “patch files.”

Read Webmonkey’s Apache for Beginners article for more details about Apache.

Information and downloads can be found at the Apache Software Foundation website.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Applet

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Apache is a freely available, and highly popular, open-source web server.

Originally, Apache was designed for Unix. Now versions are available for most operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux. There are also numerous add-ons and tailored versions of the server using the Apache module API. The name Apache comes from its origins as a series of “patch files.”

Read Webmonkey’s Apache for Beginners article for more details about Apache.

Information and downloads can be found at the Apache Software Foundation website.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

API

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The application program interface (API) is a set of building blocks for programmers.

APIs are made up of routines, protocols, and tools. Most operating environments provide an API so that programmers can write applications consistent with that environment. For example, developing software using the Windows API ensures that your user interface will be consistent with other Windows applications, making it easier for users to learn your new programs.

Use on the Web

Web APIs provide simple ways to interact with websites. Using an API, you can extract public data from sites like del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg to create mashups, reuse data or just about anything else you can imagine.

APIs are also useful for extracting your own private data from a web service so that you can back it up elsewhere or display it on another site.

When talking about APIs you’ll here the following terms quite a bit.

Common Web API Related Terms

  • Web service/API — These terms are largely interchangeable and simple refer to the ways you can interact with the data on your favorite websites.
  • Method — A method is just one aspect of an API; you might also see methods refered to a functions. For instance, if you’re interacting with Flickr, you might want to get your public photos. To do so you would use the get_user_photos method.
  • Response — The information returned by the API method that you’ve called.
  • REST — Short for Representational State Transfer. REST treats data as a web document that lives at a specific URL. REST APIs use standard HTTP requests such as GET, PUT, HEAD, DELETE and POST to interact with data.
  • XML-RPC — This older API scheme formats method calls and responses as XML documents which are sent over HTTP.
  • SOAP — Simple Object Access Protocol. A W3C standard for passing messages across the network. SOAP is the successor to XML-RPC. It’s complexity has led many to disparage SOAP and with more APIs leaning toward REST, SOAP’s future is uncertain.
  • Ajax — Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Technically it has nothing to do with APIs, however many sites using APIs send their queries out using Ajax which is partially responsible for the popularity of JSON.
  • JSON — JavaScript Object Notation. JSON’s main advantage is that it is easy to convert from JSON to nearly any other programming language. JSON uses key-value pairs and arrays, something common to PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and most other languages. The portability of JSON has made it an increasingly popular choice for sites developing APIs.


Popular Web APIs

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Architecture

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In computer science, architecture means the conceptual arrangement of a system’s components.

Taking the analogy of a physical building, if a website’s individual pages are rooms, its architecture is the hypertextual relationship between the rooms within the structure.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Banners

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Banners are a basic unit of advertising on the web.

They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations. You can probably see one right now at the top of the page.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Behavior

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Setting a dHTML element’s behavior attribute allows you to customize the element.

Microsoft implemented the behavior attribute of Cascading Style Sheets in a way that enabled object-oriented programming to enter the world of web authoring. By encapsulating dHTML in an external object, the properties and methods of that object can be used. A web page can then use these objects with the behavior attribute. This means, for example, that a web author no longer had to perform an explicit browser detection.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

BeOS

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BeOS, or Be Operating System, was the flagship product of Be, Inc.

Development of the operating system ceased around 2001 after the purchase of Be, Inc. by Palm, Inc. Development for BeOS has continued thanks to a small community of developers.

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