Topic Archive: Back Button

Really Simple History: Onwards and upwards

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, September 12, 2007 @ 5:25 am

I'm excited to announce that I've heard the call and volunteered to tackle maintenance and stewardship of Really Simple History, Brad Neuberg's intuitive, lightweight Ajax history library. Brad developed RSH a couple of years ago, drawing inspiration from the Dojo Toolkit folks to deliver a standalone library that provides back-button and bookmarking support for Ajax apps in IE6 and various Gecko-based browsers. Since, then, many additional Ajax frameworks have implemented back-button and bookmark support, some of them drawing on Brad's work.

Meanwhile, Brad's been too busy with other projects to upgrade RSH for a variety of new and existing browsers: IE7, Opera, Safari/Mac and Safari/Windows. I asked Brad to let me take care of his baby for several reasons. For one thing, I've been an enthusiastic user of the library. For another, I've been wanting to get involved on a more formal basis with open-source JavaScript projects. But most of all, I believe RSH remains a great tool for folks who want a solution to the Ajax history issue without the overhead of a larger Ajax framework.

I'm currently working with Brad to migrate RSH to Google Code, get acquainted with the bug base, and start tackling the thorny issues surrounding Ajax history support in the 2007 browser landscape. I look forward to shamelessly pilfering the many fine solutions uncovered by a large community of developers since Brad's initial work. (Brad was kind enough to point me to this blog post from Bertrand Le Roy, which lays out many of the aforementioned fine solutions and thorny issues.)

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from RSH users about their hopes for the future of the framework. Comments, please, or ping me directly at bdillard (at) pathf.com. Thanks!

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agile ajax