I was writing up some notes for my next guest spot on the Lab with Leo next week (which will appropriately be about comparing and contrasting AJAX frameworks) when I realized that I probably shouldn’t let all this research and paraphrasing work that I’ve put together go to waste. Most of it won’t make it on air, I’m sure, but it seems useful to make it available here in case anyone is curious. This also just happens to be relevant to (and also completely unrelated to) Brian LeRoux’s Vancouver AJAX & Beer meetup which is happening tonight over at the Irish Heather (and which I will be most enthusiastically attending as soon as I post this article.)

What my (non-scientific) research ended up becoming is basically a modified SWOT analysis. I did quite a bit of digging on the pros and cons of various AJAX frameworks that I didn’t have much experience with (most of my work has been with the YUI and script.aculo.us), such as MooTools, ext.js and Dojo. Not to mention the more highly-coupled frameworks out there like ASP.NET AJAX and the Google Web Tookit. During said digging, I failed to come across much in terms of recent comparisons between frameworks, so it seemed like a good idea to post up the rather high-level view of the different popular frameworks available that I’ve put together. Doesn’t hurt to let people comment if I’ve mucked something up or missed anything important, too.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Steve Calvert (or nu-steve, as we like to refer to him here) at OpenRoad for his insight into working with MooTools, which I had very little knowledge of.

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Updated: January 25, 2008

Just a totally self-serving (yet informative) post, this time.

I’m selling my 2005 Nissan Murano SL AWD, so I figured I’d post it up here as well as on all the usual sites (Craigslist, Facebook, Driving.ca, BuySell.com, and Flickr.)

The specs are listed below. I have a whole boatload of photos up in this Flickr set, as well. The SUV has super low mileage (30,500 km), has over two years left on the extended warranty from Nissan, and I’m a private owner, so you save the GST (which you’d pay if you were buying it from a dealership.) It’s been serviced regularly (last time was a week ago), and was detailed just today.

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A rare opportunity presented itself last Thursday, as I was invited to do a guest spot on The Lab With Leo, hosted by none other than Leo Laporte. I have to admit that I was unaware of Mr. Laporte’s reputation until I received the invite to do the show, but after going through the whole process from invitation, to preparation, to actual filming, I have to say it was quite enjoyable, and Leo’s team is excellent to work with. I even managed to sneak in a few photos of the set while I was there.

The topic I was asked to discuss with Leo was “Getting Started with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)”, for which I prepared some basic slides as well as a walkthrough of how to implement the TabView control with some minor customization. It appears they found me via the TabView tutorial that I posted a few weeks back. Interestingly, the episode I filmed isn’t scheduled to air until January 2008 on G4techTV (which translates into a Shaw Digital Cable channel in greater Vancouver). As I understood it, the crew at the Lab With Leo film three to four episodes a day, so getting 15-20 episodes filmed in a one-week span appears to be commonplace. To a layman when it comes to the television industry, at a glance that looks like a helluva lot of work. :)

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You might be wondering about the subject of this post. I’m sure you’ve never heard of Protagonize.com, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that: it doesn’t exist yet. Well, at least not in any place you could find it publicly. Fortunately, it’s just about complete and should be on its way to a browser near you within the next few weeks.

Protagonize is a little side project that I’ve been working on during my off-hours (i.e. evenings and weekends, whenever I get a chance), for the last few months. I haven’t had as much time to dedicate to it as I’d have liked, but it’s coming together and should be ready to go live quite soon. I wanted to be done at least a month or two ago, but between work and having a life (!), as well as my own personal form of scope creep, it’s taken a little longer than I had anticipated.

What exactly is this all about? As my oh-so-eloquent post title implies, Protagonize is an online community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that’s spelled right), a very specific type of collaborative fiction. Early forms of this on the web date back over a decade, when Snoot.com popularized a site called “Choose Your Own Schizophrenia”, an collaborative fiction site popular in the mid-to-late ’90s. Of course, this all dates back to the old Choose Your Own Adventure™ series that started back in 1979 and ran until 1998, published by Bantam Books.

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After spending the last few months hacking away at the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), I’ve figured out how to do a few things that are pretty much undocumented. The YUI TabView component, specifically, is a pretty slick control with a very lightweight structure and simple, elegant markup. On the other hand, customizing a TabView instance can be a little daunting for anyone who hasn’t spent a lot of time mucking with relatively elaborate CSS.

Since I spent a while digging away on this topic the other night, and didn’t come across anything useful as a how-to after searching for a half hour, I thought I’d post a quick how-to / tutorial for anyone trying to get rounded corners going for their TabView implementation. Hopefully it’ll save you a little aggravation. :)

The Demo

Try out the YUI TabView rounded corners demo.

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