SCWCD

I haven't done a review in a while, so I am going to write a review about this book: SCWCD Exam Study Kit, Second Edition, by Hanumant Deshmukh, Jignesh Malavia, and Matthew Scarpino.

If you are considering getting yourself SCWCD certified, I would highly recommend you to *not* get this book. There are just so many problems with this book.... for starters, I don't find this book making the studying any easier. Cert guides like these are supposed to cover the exam objectives which the reader needs to master in a clear an concise manner. This book however, has a number of sections that goes into details that are mostly irrelevant for the exam while other sections don't cover the topic adequately.

And for a book that's in second edition already, it's hard to believe there could be so many mistakes, just take a look at http://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?messageID=51256. That's just plain sloppy

My rating: 3/5

The problem with AJAX

AJAX is the buzz on the web these days and as you know, it's supposed to allow a site to retrieve some XML data from some place and use it to render a part of a web page without having to load the entire page. And XML data is just everywhere on the web, most easily found as a feed, like RSS. So there I was thinking of pulling the RSS feed from my blog and then using it to build a dynamic list of entries to put on my site. Sounds cool doesn't it? So what's the problem?

Well, it's actually more of a limitation that a problem . The limitation is that the RSS feed must be on the same domain as my website, since cross-domain XMLHttpRequests are not allowed for security reasons (I haven't read up on this but since all the browsers out there restrict this, it must be a bad thing).

So is my idea shot down? At times like this I usually turn to Google for the answer; this time the answer came from Google, literally, in the form of another one of their nifty APIs. Since Blogger is part of Google, it's no surprise they have APIs for everything including flushing the toilet! What's surprising is how easy it was to use, all it takes is one line and one callback function to render the data, really slick.

Anyways, the page that I was reading is this one http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/json.html Specifically I used the JSON-in-script method to list my latest blog headings on my site now =)

WTP 1.5.1

WTP 1.5.1 was released this past Friday, Sept 29, 2006 (although the web page didn't update until today). So what's special about this release? Well, it's the first WTP release where I had contributed some bug fixes to. I joined my current team literally the (first business) day after 1.5 was released; that itself is kind of interesting because there is a clear separation of what I did and did not work on. Secondly, Sept 29 is kind of special too since it marks my 3th year working at IBM. Coincidence perhaps?

The universe sure works in mysterious ways...

Web Site Updates

I have been working on a couple of new sections on my home page. First is the photo album section. Rather than writing my own photo album though, I am just rendering the interface off of ImageStation's RSS feed (and this way, I don't have to take up my limited space on geocities). This mini-project was also my chance to experiment with some AJAX programming techniques. Although, in the end, I can't really claim credit for writing any AJAX specific code because I came across a handy little package called Sarissa.

Originally I thought it would be fun to write some js library functions to wrapper around the calls to the XMLHttpRequest object and handle doing XSLT as well. But as usual, anything I think of doing has already been done, I am serveral years too late in fact T_T. Sarissa is such a project, it provides a nice interface for doing AJAX programming. It was quite easy to use, although it's not without its share of bugs and quirks. But it's definitely better than me fudging around with browser specific instantiations and handling of XMLHttpRequest objects.

So now that the photo album is working, I put it to use for the second section I was working on, which is a section on my cats (those who know me shouldn't be surprised right? ;) The cats section can be found here. There are 3 albums so far =)

AJAX and REST

I first read about AJAX on Danny's site. I thought it was some kind of server-side add-on module, but actually AJAX is technique for doing Web development that improves a page's interactivity without doing page loads. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and you can read all about it here. The concept is quite interesting. Basically, parts of the HTML on a page is generated dynamically with Javascript, using XML data retrieved from the server via an XMLHttpRequest object. And since the data exchange is asychronous, the whole page does not need to load.

So this AJAX stuff is cool but how to get my hands into it you ask? Well, one of the things you can do is add a Google quick search to your site. Yes, that's right, Google has an AJAX Search API, and I am quite impressed with how easy it was to incorporate into my home page.

Speaking of web development, I was suprised to find that YouTube has a REST API for retrieving videos from their site. REST is only a concept I've heard about from my manager once, this is the first time I encountered a real world application of it (but as it turns out, many sites such as Amazon and eBay have REST APIs too, I just don't know about them). REST is certainly a topic I would like to learn about. Furthermore, it sounds like AJAX and REST goes hand in hand together.