Add AJAX to the mix

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has been around for a while now and I´ve decided that there is finally enough browser support to start integrating it into my XDe web module set. That and my main development server´s HD choosing to stop spinning has made the last week interesting!

The golden egg of being able to have event based page updates (basically something that will make web pages act more like programs you run on your client computer) is what AJAX is all About. Considering the web application strengths of the XDe that I develop it´s a natural fit - but I´m always fairly skeptical About these things until I can be sure that it´s going to be able to be done in a standards compliant way and isn´t going to fail on half the browsers out there. I think we´ve finally arrived there and I´ve actually already integrated some AJAX into the back-end of this web site.

It will live firmly in the back-end of things for a while to assist with administration of the site - but it will start to rear it´s Head soon - hopefully to the benefit of all.

So I was merrily coding away when I start getting strange errors from my development system (a 8 year old Del PowerEdge 1400 server that is probably been on-line for all but About 2 days in 8 years!) It turned out that the SCSI boot drive in the system though now would be a good time to just stop spinning :(

I didn´t even have to pull out the hair at this point - it just fell out on it´s own.

The good news is that my dad, amazingly, had an old SCSI II drive sitting in an external enclosure in his crawl space (WOOT) so I was able to call the entire experience an Upgrade ;)

Anyway - after several hours of bliss... I now have the latest bleeding edge LAMP development server up and running and have rebuild most of the dev sites from my nightly backup (BIG SMILE FOR BACKUPS!)

So it´s Back to adding AJAX and updating modules now - before we´re off to Victoria tomorrow for SARSCENE.

---