I am a very visual person. I like to see graphical representations of large sets of data and complex problems, structures, or processes. This includes application databases, so I was immediately drawn to a new Rails plugin, written by Tom ten Thij, called Schema Browser. It’s as easy as pulling it from git, and running a generate command. The screenshot below is from Tom’s mephisto blog and it illustrates the very nice schema graphic produced from the plugin. Installation instructions on Tom’s blog post, Rails schema browser plugin: proof of concept.

I’m a big fan of Firefox, and over time I tend to collect a rather large number of plugins. The problem is, despite all the great functionality they provide, you can get carried away and seriously impact browser performance. As well, not all plugins are created equal as far as performance goes, and not all play nicely together.

My long time friend and fellow Internet Software Developer, Steve Pothoven, has posted a test on his blog which measures your browser’s processing speed. It can be used in two important ways:

1) to address the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph and help you check from time to time how your browser is performing after you’ve added more plugins, and

2) to determine just how much Javascript you may want to place into a user’s browser. His blog post lists a sampling of various computers and browsers so you can see how much various combinations can handle.

As for adjusting your Firefox to improve performance, when I first ran the test on my laptop, I had a .08. I disabled all my plugins and jumped drastically to almost .20. I began re-enabling the plugins one by one, and in the end determined that all were acceptable except two: Firebug and Yslow (which requires Firebug). Those two plugins destroyed my browser performance. For now, I’ve turned them both off, and enjoy a healthy .15 rating. Note: leaving Firebug enabled as a plugin, but disabled within the Firebug’s preferences does NOT improve performance.
Visit Steve’s test page and see what your performance is and where you fall within the sample numbers. Try disabling any plugins you have and testing again to see the difference.

Tip: If you have a large number of plugins, it may be time consuming to disable them all, so start Firefox in safe mode, by doing Run -> CMD and then entering ‘firefox -safe-mode’

Hmm. According to Ajaxian, there are approximately 210 Ajax frameworks available. Is that really enough? Come on, let’s at least have one for each day of the year.

Now my question is, do you have to know all 210 in order to get a job as an Ajax developer?

Read 210 Ajax Frameworks and Counting.

Tripbase is a travel site with an interesting Ajax interface. The site is designed to help the user find travel destinations according to their preferences and interests. For the Ajax interface, sliders are first provided allowing the user to set the type of destination they are looking for, by weighing their preferences on Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, and Attractions. After that initial selection is done, a list of top suggestions is presented on the page, and further preference customizations are given, including the dates and duration you want to travel, where you are departing from, your preferred weather, your budget, the type of trip you are looking for, the continents you are interested in, and if you want to travel in a high or low tourist season.

As you adjust the preferences on the left, the suggestions update live on the right side of the screen. In this section, it shows one photo of the suggested destination, and shows the cost per day and the population, with a link for more information.

When you click for more information on any of the suggestions, a window appears over the results with the detail information. The detail window shows the temperature, tourist season and rainfall for the period of travel indicated; has photos, and links to articles; a list of things to do, dining, nightlife, lodging, shopping, nature, and then has links to search for flights or hotels (using a different web site).

The interface is easy to use and was very responsive on my laptop using Firefox 2.

After further thought and consideration, I retract my statement that HTML should never be sent back to an AJAX request. There was a reason I made that statement, however I can’t fill you in on it yet (hint: I have to wait for a future software release). But, even with that reason, I have no issue with using HTML in an AJAX response. I wrongly applied a wise and fully correct architectural principle, which I will elaborate on in a future post, to the AJAX situation.

Hopefully at some point in the future, I can go into more detail on why I first wrongly concluded that this should never be done. Until then, rest assured, I will use whatever format fits the circumstance (JSON, HTML, XML).