Technical Primers April 17th 2008
Lets make sure you're crystal clear on this idea of the Web 2.0. When you hear the term Web 2.0, you should first ask, "What's Web 1.0?" Although you'll rarely hear Web 1.0, it is meant to refer to the traditional Web where you have a very distinct request and response model. For example, go to Amazon.com and click a button or enter a search term. A request is made to a server and then a response comes back to your browser. That request has a lot more than just a list of books and titles, though; it's actually another complete HTML page. As a result, you probably get some flashing or flickering as your Web browser's screen is redrawn with this new HTML page. In fact, you can clearly see the request and response, delineated by each new page you see.
The Web 2.0 dispenses with this very visible back-and-forth (to a large degree). As an example, visit a site like Google Maps or Flickr. On Google Maps, for example, you can drag the map around and zoom in and zoom out with very little redrawing. Of course, requests and responses do go on here, but all behind the scenes. As a user, the experience is much more pleasant and feels a lot like a desktop application. This new feel and paradigm is what you see when someone refers to Web 2.0. - Article source
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December 14th 2007
XML - it's the great catchall three letter acronym of the last few years. Take a few minutes (4:31) to watch this fascinating video about where the web is headed
It is possible to create complete websites using XML and XSL stylesheets. Mostly these days though it is used to add information to a site from an external XML feed.
We have created an XML parser to decipher feeds and deliver readable content back to the browser. A great level of interest is also being shown in RSS ('Rich Site Summary' or 'Real Simple Syndication') which allows companies to feed content from their sites to mobile devices or RSS readers.
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September 23rd 2007
Ajax is a web technology which you can use to make sites behave more like a desktop applications.
There is no more waiting for pages to load with Ajax. We can take the background server side (database for example) calls & responses, then input them discreetly into session data which allows instant update of screen items.
When the technology emerged in a useable form about 3 years ago there was a huge rush to roll it out at every opportunity resulting in sites that lost site of useability, development standards and compliance.
We've been discreetly using Ajax to enhance the user experience on our sites. We have used it particularly in our CMS application where standards and compliance can be relaxed as you have control over your user group.
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June 17th 2007
A new weblog or blog is born every half second on the internet. We have looked into this phenomenon and got deep, down and dirty with a few of the different 'personal publishing platforms' namely - Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Wetpaint and Typepad.
The basic platforms are fairly easy to setup and generally involve choosing a pre-defined template. Where unique functionality is required there is generally a plug-in already available but not always!
Making them look just that little bit different from everyone else's 'blog' is the rub and does require graphic design skills and coding knowledge that is not for the faint hearted.
In conclusion publishing platforms offer a real alternative to clients (Start-Up businesses and Charities for example) for whom the bespoke development route might not suit for one reason or another.
Being able to offer these types of website to our customers is another quiver in our armoury of available choices.
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April 20th 2007
Web Standards compliance is a term you are finally beginning to hear being used more and more. Essentially there is a development standard, not dissimiliar to the building regulations that property developers must adhere to, that all websites should comply with.
Unfortunately many of todays HTML authoring programs produce non-compliant code and it is often easier for developers to pull a veil over this non compliance than get in under the hood and sort it out. While we can't claim to have been compliant since day 1, we have over the last 6 years made great efforts and taken the time when developing our sites to go the extra mile and create compliant code. Addionally we always provide a link for third parties to externally validate our code.
We recently supplied a fully editable Hotel website linked into a booking engine. An interesting feature of the site was the fully W3C compliant hierarchial tree navigation menu. To create these menus we used a mixture of PHP arrays and validated CSS. This system allows the client to add (or delete) links to pages very easily.
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March 1st 2007
We recently found a way of leveraging embedded image 'Metadata' (XMP) through our programming langauge of choice, PHP, for an innovative architects website - clasbybeale.ie
Here's the lowdown from Adobe on XMP, for further information use the link provided. "Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing, and leveraging this valuable metadata — opening the door for more efficient job processing, workflow automation, and rights management, among many other possibilities." - http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/
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