When programming desktop applications I’ve always been a supporter of lazy loading of objects but I’ve never given this much thought when creating websites. Until now.

Just a short note, i found this today – Google Web Toolkit. It looks very promising and I’m just about to start experimenting with it (can’t wait!). It’s a framework for creating AJAX applications with the usual gmail look, but the fresh approach is that you write the application in Java – and then you compile to to Javascript/HTML when you’re ready to ship. I’m don’t how well this development model works with dynamic data etc.

When implementing script.aculo.us’ AJAX In Place Editor for a project I’m currently working on, I ran into some character encoding problems. My PHP framework uses ISO-8859-1, while the ajax script was submitting UTF-8 to my server. Reading the wiki documentation, I discovered that this was a ‘known feature’: The form data is sent encoded in UTF-8 regardless of the page encoding. I was recommended to use iconv to convert back to ISO-8859-1 on the server.

There’s an ancient fable that tells of a frog that falls into a pail of milk. Unable to scramble out, the creature trashes around, seemingly drowning. Eventually however, his frantic struggles turn the milk into butter – and he hops away. Until now, that fable has been a good metaphor of my struggle with the seven headed beast called JavaScript. I’ve written my lines of code, gotten inane script errors from IE, tried, failed and tried again.

Or, 24 ways that is. If you’re were sleeping through december month, or maybe too busy handling your mother-in-law, you might have missed 24ways, the ajax/web2.0 advent calendar. The idea is simple; every day they would release a new ajax/web related article. The articles are written by different authors, who are probably considered experts in their field. It recently struck me how ingenious this is from a marketing point of view.