Bits From My Life

It was not that long, since I experienced a problem while trying to upload a file using an ajax  trapped form. I thought, it must be me doing something wrong. I was using web2py  to embed another page into a page via ajax. That is better known to web2py folk as LOADing a component. It's just happened that one of such component contains a file upload form. It was my first time using LOAD function provided by web2py. Basically it make use of jQuery to load the page via ajax into a target div and traps input of any form in that page, so that page doesn't reload. Oh, I forgot to say that web2py is bundled with jQuery. It's always boring and tedious to understand a problem without experiencing it. So, Let's play with an example, (PS: I"m using web2py a full stack python framework, but you can use any language at server side and this problem will be there because, it's a problem with ajax) My mod...

We all are hearing the buzz about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) about a year or so. But, what the heck is that beast ? You may ask. For the user's perspective, it's the desktop like experience delivered over web. Yes, you feel like you are using a real desktop application (well, at least sort of). The richness of desktop controls is transferred to web. How RIA is build? Arise another question. These all started with that amazing kid called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML). Then more and more tools become available, like Java FX , Adobe Air , Adobe Flex (and Adobe Flash ), Microsoft Silverlight . But these tools, though it gives rapid and organized web application development, required some kind of plug-ins to be installed on your browser. There is the importance of AJAX based RIAs, because JavaScript is enabled in almost all browsers in use today. However, It's not a fool proof solution, because there are people who switch off JavaScript for some reason, lik...

  [ Source is from http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/ ] Yes, I confess, I don't like XML at all. Reason, It's way too complication and I personally feels like it's a waste of storage space. Please, don't tell me that storage(be it memory or disk) is so cheap now a days. I still care. May be because, I started my programming (Computer Science) education with mighty "C". I always prefer to squeeze memory and make my programs as small as possible, (reason, why I changed from C++ to Java, then to Python: not to mention rapid development.) . Why use XML at all. There are good old RDBMS. Well if you find buzz about ODBMS, use them. Or use simple JSON . Or better, go for Google's ProtocolBuffers. Web programming in Java, now days become full of xml configuration files.And it'll go on, getting multiplied as your system gets bigger, web services included and so on. So much work, if some one ask me about it! Thanks to web2py , I can make the same applicat...