An atypically productive Saturday in contrast with the usual lazyness that invariably attacks me on these occasions.

Met tomorrow's deadline for the fourth batch of FM 2006's translation work. Granted it was not too much as SI is keeping it sensible and partitioned but it was a good advance nonetheless which let me breathe a little more and do other stuff while I'm at it. There are two more internal deadlines set for next Sunday and the Sunday after that which I expect to meet easily, if nothing goes terribly wrong in the mean time.

Other than that, I finally took the time to learn some more about the wonders of Ajax, Ruby on Rails, XMLHttpRequest and other assorted web goodies. Apparently I've been pretty much missing the ongoing web application revolution that got full steam in the beginning of this year, largely thanks to - you guessed it - Google with stuff like GMail, Google Maps or Google Suggest. Here's a quick glance at some of the info I gathered on these subjects today:

• Apparently it was Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, who coined the term Ajax, back in February, as a shorthand (according to him) for "Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest" or else the rather accepted moniker of "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". The main idea behind the Ajax group of technologies seems to be adding another layer to the usual client-server exchange during a web session - the Ajax engine. This speeds up communication because it transforms synchronous into asynchronous communication allowing for a page to be treated not as a single monolithic entity spat out by the server but rather a patchwork of different elements which can be asynchronously sent back and forth between server and client - by means of XmlHttpRequest. This reduces the amount of information on the wire, allowing for near instant feedback to the user and so ultimately allowing for a much snappier user interface. The communication between the server and the client (the Ajax layer in particular) is done using XML. Funky!


• Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web based applications lightning fast. Found a nice couple of introductions to the subject which are pretty much jaw-dropping (at least for me that have been building web apps the hard way for a few years now) here, here and here. Wikipedia also provides valuable info on this, Ajax and more related stuff. Better yet, Seeing is Believing!.


• Other items of interest I found today are Mapping Google, Ten Essential Development Practices (via Tao of Mac), The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams and Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store, these last two being also by Jesse James Garrett, whom I mentioned earlier on, but which I haven't read yet.


• If you prefer Python over Ruby but want to retain the easiness on creating web apps which I've mentioned before using Rails, then there seems to be a worthy alternative in the form of Django. Apparently the major drawback when compared to Rails is that it doesn't include its own tiny webserver and instead relies on Apache's Mod_Python. I'll be giving this a shot over the next few days.

Well, that's pretty much it for now.