Among today’s fashionable buzzwords in web development is Ajax. Fortunately, when you’re using the BEA WebLogic Portal framework, it’s easy to add a bit of this hot new technology to your application. For a project I did this year, we used the JSON-RPC-Java Ajax implementation. To use JSONRPC(JavaScript Object Notation remote procedure call protocol), you drop the downloaded jsonrpc.jar in your application’s APP-INF/lib directory. This library contains a servlet that will catch and process your Ajax actions. You’ll have to configure the servlet in the web.xml (see the detailed instructions). Then it’s up to you to do some JavaScript coding.
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Last Friday I finally managed (been too busy lately) to visit Rotterdam’s super bookstore, Donner, to pick up a copy of Programming Ruby. I will easily spend an hour or two roaming Donner’s eight or nine floors, browsing through all their new books, discovering old ones I hadn’t seen before, sitting down for a while to read through the contents of some books to see if I should really spend the small fortune they sometimes cost these days… Usually I start by going straight to the third floor (computer books), then slowly all the way up (passing the cd department, books on art, design, movies, music etc.; top floor has books on sale); and finally I go back down again (law, economics, philosophy, magazines, gardening, food, photography, and the huge basement with fiction, Dutch & English). Anyway, there I was on the third floor, only one copy of Programming Ruby left (is it that popular or doesn’t it sell at all?)… and I didn’t buy it! Instead I took home Agile Web Development with Rails, in the true Ruby spirit: I want to create something right away, build a web site now, with Ruby. I know myself, eventually I will buy the other book and meticulously read about all the language intricacies. But for now, it’s Rails.