For quite a while, I havn't been keeping up with myself, and especially lately, my life seems so absurd and meaningless. So meaningless that I have nothing to say about them other than "Oh another game!". Perhaps, I should encourage myself to step out of this sickness and regain my youth... I know that's gonna take lots of effort, and I have been trying ever since the beginning of this school year...

XMLHttpRequest, the way of the future?

Recently, the impressively responsive interfaces in Gmail, Google suggest and A9 is attracting a lot of attention. By effectly separating presentation logic and business logic, not only does it gives a better user experience, its logical clarity is amazing. Finally, web applications can compete with traditional applications in interface response time. Not only that, it can even go above and beyond traditional application interfaces in customizability and design. It's all held together by standard compliant methods. XHML + CSS for presentation. Javascript, XML for presentation logic. These are all clientside. Then we can have serverside scripts take care of the business logic. I can't imagine a better use for PHP in this case. It's all held together by something called XMLHttpRequest. It enables the browser to send request to the server without having to refresh the page each time. For people who do web app development, this is huge! Now we can use javascript to send requests to the server, get the response back in nice XML, and then process it and display the contents clientside. If we can do this, why not take it a step further? We can in theory completely separate interface logic and server side data processing. Then why not do that? Put the server stuff elsewhere. This is not a new idea, but what's new about it is the ability for faster interface prototyping. Seriously, if we can do this, who needs flash for interfaces anymore? This sounds amazing, I plan to develop a web-based calender/organizer with this method to learn the ins and outs of it. Stay tuned.