the Fresh!

Allow me to take a quick break from writing about cross-domain Ajax, flXHR, and other such geeky things. I will be brief in mentioning an application I just ran across and my suggestion you take a look at it.

I recently switched phones to the Samsung Propel Pro. This is a big switch for me, as I’ve been on the Treo line of phones, with PalmOS, for a very long time (since before most of you knew what a smartphone was).

Actually, I’m really just biding my time until the Palm Pre is released in GSM/unlocked form (non-Sprint), hopefully sometime early next year. Mobile phone vendors, if you are listening, the better future for mobile app development is in Javascript/HTML/CSS stacks, not these proprietary hinderances we’ve been forced to endure for so long.

For now, naturally, I have to replace all my old mobile applications with ones that will work for the Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard OS that Propel Pro runs. No small task as it turns out.

The real trick is that Propel Pro doesn’t run “Classic” or “Professional”, because it doesn’t have a touchscreen. This causes many problems with a lot of WinMob apps, because they are all written assuming a touch screen, and so those apps fail for those of us unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it!) to not have touchscreens on our smart phones.

In any case, as my quest continues to find mobile apps that will work on my touchscreen-less phone, I finally found a twitter client that works well for me. @Twikini. Strange name, but a solid app none-the-less.

I’m particularly impressed by how usable the app is despite its “burden” of being without a touch-screen. On any tweet update, you can move the directional control left to do a “@reply” to the author, and right will give you a “RT @” retweet with the text already quoted. These two simple tasks have become so ingrained into DNA of what tweet’ing is about, it’s nice to see that they didn’t have to be buried in some menu option or rely on some fancy finger guesture to get at. They are quite literally at your fingertip, and I find that smart and well executed.

And the best part? The app costs just $4.95. What could be even better than that? It’s actually free! That’s right, all you have to do is write a simple blog post, like this one, and they give it to you for free. Genius, huh!?

Check out Twikini on twitter and by all means, if you have a Windows Mobile 6.1 STANDARD phone like I do, check out the app for yourself!

PS. Though this app unfortunately doesn’t do so (maybe they will, I can only hope!), if you are writing any kind of mobile app, you should be using PhoneGap!

In the wake of the jQuery flXHRproxy and Dojo flXHRproxy plugins recently released, Prototype was unfortunately left out of having a good solid plugin for flXHR… until now!

Austin resident Prototype guru Andrew Dupont recently wrote an initial version of the plugin, which I then modified and tested, and we now have a great plugin for Prototype to support flXHR in the same way as the other frameworks.

Just like with the other framework plugin versions, you simply call ‘registerOptions(…)’ to register a URL (or partial URL) destination target and a set of flXHR options to be used for that location. Then, when you later make various Ajax calls, Prototype will internally figure out if you are calling to a location that is registered and will use flXHR with the options you specified.

There is simply no other way to get easier cross-domain Ajax with Prototype than with flXHR and flXHRproxy. Take a look at flXHRproxy documentation or give the Prototype+flXHR demo a whirl.

Typical page usage might look like this:

Ajax.flXHRproxy.registerOptions('http://www.mydomain.com/',{xmlResponseText:false...});
Ajax.flXHRproxy.registerOptions('http://rss.mydomain.com/',{xmlResponseText:true...});
...
Ajax.Request('http://www.mydomain.com/something.html',{...});
...
Ajax.Request('http://rss.mydomain.com/feed.html',{...});


Enjoy the new world of possibilities and fun that Prototype and flXHRproxy now gives you for doing easy cross-domain Ajax!

Back in march, I announced the jQuery plugin for flXHR, simply the best way to do cross-domain Ajax with jQuery. It has enjoyed huge success in traffic/downloading since, and that proves that there are lots of people out there who are doing cross-domain Ajax with frameworks like jQuery and Dojo, and that people are craving for better, easier and more flexible ways of doing so. flXHR is the answer to your cross-domain Ajax woes.

Building on the success from the jQuery plugin, I’m now pleased to announce that I’ve released a Dojo plugin for jQuery which is nearly identical in functionality. Basically, all you have to do is load the ‘flXHRproxy’ Dojo plugin, and then call ‘registerOptions(…)’ to register a URL (or partial URL) destination target and a set of flXHR options to be used for that location. Then, when you later make various Ajax calls, Dojo will internally figure out if you are calling to a location that is registered and will use flXHR (or any other transports you register!) with the options you specified.

If you use Dojo, and you do cross-domain Ajax calls, I urge you to consider flXHR and flXHRproxy. Take a look at flXHRproxy documentation or give the Dojo+flXHR demo a whirl.

Typical page usage might look like this:

dojox.io.flXHRproxy.registerOptions('http://www.mydomain.com/',{xmlResponseText:false...});
dojox.io.flXHRproxy.registerOptions('http://rss.mydomain.com/',{xmlResponseText:true...});
...
dojo.xhrGet({url:'http://www.mydomain.com/something.html'...});
...
dojo.xhrGet({url:'http://rss.mydomain.com/feed.html'...});


This XHR registry concept is very powerful, as it allows you to have multiple different types of Ajax calls and transports and configurations for different types of data that you are mashing up in a single page. It takes all the guess work out of configuring your code to intelligently use the right communication method and options as needed for each Ajax call. It just simply could not get any easier to do cross-domain Ajax calls with Dojo now.

Enjoy the new world of possibilities and fun that Dojo+flXHR now gives you for doing easy cross-domain Ajax!

PS. Teaser: Coming soon, flXHR+YQL = cross-domain Ajax to literally any site on the internet! How cool is that!?