Unpossibilities…

What do you do every day, besides going to work, having dinner and walking the dog? Just like me you're probably checking out some of your favourite websites, right? You type in the URL, hit enter and wait for the website to show up. When done reading the website you move onto the next one.

Most people I know run their own website or weblog and to keep up with their stories a nifty three-letter abbreviation RSS exists. It's hard to imagine current life without RSS feeds. Everyday millions of people write articles about interesting stuff, which varies from the latest cellphone that got released to a new chemical substance that has been discovered.

Those of you who aren't familiar with RSS should watch the video RSS in Plain English. This video will describe what the three-letter abbreviation is, how it works and of course what it can do for you. Once you go RSS, there's no turning back!

A picture is worth a thousand words. That's why our application will be capable of exporting data to beautiful pie graphs instead of outputting long lists of raw data. As a Mac user there are several options to develop your own Ruby on Rails (RoR) web application. I've always used Locomotive to develop my RoR web applications. Locomotive also offers you a RMagick Rails Bundle. This Bundle includes the ImageMagick package and Ruby RMagick bindings. The ImageMagick package and the Ruby RMagick bindings are the preferred tools of Rails experts for image manipulation - BUT are also notoriously difficult to properly install and configure. Locomotive spares you the pain. Just download the +RMagick bundle from the Bundles page and you're ready to go! Go check out some beautiful graph examples generated with Ruby and Gruff.

• Locomotive Official Website
• Locomotive Bundles
• Gruff Graphs for Ruby
• Gruff Documentation

Collaborative annotation of web pages is something many people are working on. Fleck is one of them and got released at the Techcrunch party last thursday. With this plugin installed you can leave and share annotations with friends all over the world. It's like putting a post-it on a website. Imagine reviewing web pages, leaving a little note with Fleck and emailing those pages to your colleagues. They take a look at your note and give feedback the same way. Or what about an online step-by-step tutorial. Just follow the notes and work your way through a web page. Easy eeey! Just recently I've visited (together with fellow students) Fleck HQ in Amsterdam where they shared information about the next web (Web 2.0, Flex etc.), and talked about their latest projects. See my previous post about visiting Fleck HQ. Fleck at the Techcrunch Party (photos posted by Patrick de Laive). Get the Firefox Fleck extension. Also available, the Wordpress plugin by Robert Gaal. * Edit: anyone got photos from our Fleck HQ visit? Please contact me. Forgot to take some photographs myself.

For those who do not understand what it is that I'm working on, please read this post as it will describe in short what the application will do. The main purpose is to create an application giving teachers the ability to create their online surveys meant for students. Here are some of the requirements;

• Easy to use withouth any technical knowledge.
• Guarantee students anonymity.
• Web 2.0...next generation webapplication.
• Maintaining usergroups.
• Compare different surveys.
• Export data to SPSS.

At this moment we're working both with AJAX and Flex combined with Ruby on Rails. By doing so we hope to get a better understanding of the capabilities and differences from these new web development techniques. In some of my previous posts I showed a little example of AJAX. Timo Vos, a colleague, created a small Flex demo. It's far from being advanced, however it does show that panels and data grids are easily built. Combined with a database and its nifty looks, Flex might be the winner during this project. Less coding, more fun! Expect more updates soon.

Yesterday i started using AJAX for the very first time. I was amazed to see how quick a small AJAX application was built. Here's my thought on this first experience. My first attempt was to realize a live search engine connected to a MySQL database. The purpose of this little application was to search for a user stored in the database. While entering your data in the search box, the live search application immediately starts to present (possible) users that you may be looking for. Example: Live search with AJAX My second attempt was to create a simple drag & drop application. This will be a key element in the prototype we're working on. By using tutorials found on the internet a simple application was built. It shows two ways in storing the data which contains the position of each element. One method is storing the information into a database using a submit button. The second method is storing the information immediately when the mouse button is released. This way the information is stored directly into the database. Example: Drag & drop with AJAX The second drag & drop method (shown in the above demo) is using the Sajax library allowing the programmer to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from their webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. What I liked most about AJAX is the fact that it can be used on webservers immediately without installing new modules. I tried using AJAX on webservers running Apache, PHP and MySQL by default and did not encounter a single problem. During the upcoming days I'll be looking into animation with AJAX.

A new week, a new post. We're almost finished with our research on existing applications (similar to our idea) and willingness by teachers and students in using our application. While finishing our research I've started learning AJAX. At this point it's uncertain if we will be using this technology to realise our application. There's also a possible use in Ruby on Rails and Flex.

Visit the eVal example dump for examples i made (export more examples in the upcoming days). For example, check out the drag & drop example. It also shows two methods storing the data to a MySQL database, manually or automatically (which i prefer).

Edit: Picked up a couple of books that might help understanding AJAX better:

• Ajax for Dummies, ISBN 0-471-78597-0
• Ajax Hacks - Tips and Tools for creating responsive Websites
• Foundations of Ajax, ISBN 1-59059-582-3
• Professional Ajax

Last weekend i was asked to explain what Web 2.0 is. Amazingly it took me real effort in explaining. Basicly it ended up in showing examples. A good lesson teaching me to prepare myself a little bit better ^_-. Those who would like to know more about Web 2.0 should check out (sure I will) the following links: - Web 2.0 Wikipedia - Web 2.0 YouTube

Take a look at Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites for an overview of all kinds of Web 2.0 sites that crop up all over the place.

"Remember The Milk is here to save us from ourselves"

What will people do when they're tired of watching porn on the internet. They start Web 2.0!!!

Quoting emoat:

So now, what to me is the best part of Web 2.0? The fact that the web is being used for what it should be used for, the intelligent exchange of ideas, also the ability to get news/information from other sources then the main stream media unfiltered and without a bias. It shows that if given the tools, regular Joe's can get the info they need to make better decisions.

Read the article and see if Web 2.0 might be for you.