OSCon2k5.2.AM

Went to the AJAX tutorial this morning. No major complaints. DHTML is still scary, and there are a lot of buzzwords still floating around. Not so much buzzwords as just alphabet city. Cross browser DOM issues are better than years ago, but not done. There are some [http://www.dojotoolkit.org/ toolkits] available, but how good there are depends on what you need to do. One aspect I kept thinking about was how we can (or if we can) use this technology to enrich things like phpPgAdmin, where we suffer from limitations that desktop clients like [http://pgadmin.postgresql.org pgadmin] don’t have to deal with. I don’t see a lot of use for it, but there are a few places where it would be nice. I think the thing that will slow this from getting put in is that there isn’t a good toolkit for PHP and AJAX (or ist there?) which means you might be forced to do a lot of this stuff by hand. We’ve actually kicked up our [http://phppgadmin.kattare.com/phppgadmin3cvs/ interactivity] with the cvs code, with the new multi-server, dynamically generating tree navigation, but working with that code is scary. Still there were some pointers to some [http://www.clagnut.com/blog/340/ good tools] for debugging that type of stuff in the future. Actually that is one problem I see here, in that I think working with AJAX is something you need to spend time on, you can’t just one off stuff. This would be ok if I integrated some AJAX into my work apps, but for developers who are time strapped contributing to open source projects, it might be hard to get wrapped into something.