Ajax

Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.

As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground.

We’ve all felt that haze that forms around your eyes when you’re trying to study lines and lines of code from a written tutorial. After an hour or so, you’re eyes simply become too weakened to continue reading. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of video tutorials. You can sit back and learn at your own pace. I’ve compiled a list of over thirty screencasts that are guaranteed to help you.

Yesterday, I took some time to “celebrate” our 6 month anniversary by revisiting our older tutorials. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how much incredible material that we have on this site - material that some of you may not even know about! If you’re like me, you use the weekend to catch up on your learning - since work takes up so much time. Today, I’ll list the top twenty tutorials on NETTUTS (in no particular order) that will jump-start your education.

There are a few special techniques or effects that can spice up just about any web page. These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know. They’re essential parts of any web developer’s toolbox. If you haven’t seen them yet, you no doubt will in your future web development endeavors.

Maybe you’re a seasoned jQuery pro. Heck, maybe you’re John Resig. On the other hand, maybe you read words like “Prototype”, “jQuery”, and “Mootools” and think to yourself, “What the heck are these?” Now is the time to learn.

This article walks you through the steps of retrofitting a Web 1.0 shopping site with Ajax techniques. In addition to Ajax techniques and best practices, you learn how Ajax can improve your user experience through principles of progressive enhancement, usability, and user experience design.

There is no such thing as a JavaScript plugin contends James Coglan. I completely agree that there are no, specific, techniques within the JavaScript language that make "plugins" possible (such as the ability to namespace code and import it, or some such).

HOWEVER - I will contend that such a thing as plugins exist and are logically distinct from "random JavaScript code that manipulates other JavaScript code" as long as the following points are met:

Like every web developer I've spent a lot of time using the Firebug extension to Firefox in my day-to-day development. I've found it interesting to see how my development methodologies have changed with access to that tool.

Unsurprisingly, my personal development style mirrors much of the general web dev public. But what I find most interesting is to try and track trends in web development that Firebug has single-handedly revolutionized.

Firebug Advances

Performance Profiling

Posted by Trevor Johns, Google Data APIs Team