The Days of Web Standards

As I mentioned before, I was going to appear at The Days of Web Standards, 2007. And as also mentioned, I was working on an ajax messaging library. I'm sitting here at the Days in Akihabara now, listening to one of the last presentations for the day. There's quite a lot of people here, and there's a certain conferency mood in the air. I have the W3C on my left and the Mozilla Corp. on my right. Got some nice Firefox stickers.

I combined the two mentioned matters and did a presentation and demo developing a chat widget using the freshly-released Ajax Messaging Library. Well, it's in early beta quality with many features planned but not yet implemented, but it works! Even on stage (except for a small bug, hehe). Anyway, it's out there now! I'll write more about it later.

P.S. I did the presentation in my socks; my shoes were drenched this morning by Typhoon no. 4.

A JavaScript messaging library

I'm working on a library for sending messages between browsers using JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, and PHP/sqlite on a server. The idea is that even though it's not possible to open a connection of sorts directly between the clients (i.e. web browsers viewing a page, or even different pages, or running a widget), you can pull for updates in a way that will make it seem like you have a connection open. Not only that, but all client listening on the same channel, so to speak, will receive the messages, so it's like broadcasting. Technically this is nothing fancy, it's just that you don't see it much, and if implemented and packaged nicely I think it'll be useful and fun to use.

How do I know this works? Because it's based on a much cleaned up version of the code used on paintmyblog.com - which has proven itself already. I look forward to writing some cool apps using this library, and I hope other people will use it as well. Expect the first release next week.