My IBM developerWorks series makes it debut

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, March 5, 2008 @ 9:51 am

The first installment in my tutorial series "Ajax Overhaul" is now live at IBM developerWorks. The full title, and it's a mouthful, is "Ajax overhaul, Part 1: Retrofit existing sites with Ajax and jQuery: Improve your user experience and simplify your navigation with modal dialogs." Targeted at Ajax beginners, the piece walks through the steps of progressively enhancing a Web 1.0 shopping site with Ajax and DHTML using nothing but client-side code.

The hook for the entire series is this: "The user experience of most
web sites suffers from some common, fundamental flaws. Don't compound
those mistakes by layering Ajax on top of them. Instead, use Ajax to
fix those existing problems - and do so in a way that degrades
flawlessly."

This first installment focuses on modal dialogs. The forthcoming second installment will tackle tooltips and lightboxes, while the third installment will delve into navigational tabs and image slideshows. I'm hard at work on the fourth installment, which will cover Ajax-powered forms.

As a whole, the series is about 40% user-experience stuff and 60%
step-by-step technical instruction; for this first installment, that
those proportions are probably flipped.

My goal with this series was to show an introductory-level audience not just how to plug cool new technologies into existing web applications, but when and why to do so. A lot of technology tutorials teach developers how to play with shiny new technologies for their own sake. Instead, I wanted to show them how to meet user needs with whatever technology gets the job done. I'm looking forward to feedback from the IBM developerWorks audience so I can see how well my message comes across. There's a feedback form at the bottom of the article.

agile ajax

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1. 

   [...] also want to look at parts 1 and [...]

   Pingback by Pathfinder Development » “Ajax Overhaul, Part 3: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery, Ajax tabs, and photo carousels” Up on IBM Developer Works, Tuesday, July 8, 2008 @ 10:16 pm

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