I’ve compiled a nearly complete list of Ajax Frameworks and Libraries. I intend to test as many as I can and post the results here. (I’ll test the commercial one I can get a license for.) If I missed any, if you have any suggestions, or you work on any of these projects – please feel free to email me via the contact form. Click here for the detailed list with links to each, license type, and basic technology !! AccessKey Active Widgets Aflax Ajax AC Ajax CFC AJAX Engine Ajax Tags AJAX.net AjaxAnywhere AjaxGear Toolkit AjaxRequest AJForm AJS ANAA Anthem.NET APHPLix Aspects aSSL Authentico Backbase Bajax Behaviour Bindows CakePHP Crossvision Dojo DOMApi DPSyntax Hilighter DWR Echo2 Engine Flash Object Flexible Ajax Fresh Logc Gaia Widgets Google...(read more)

Hi folks, sorry I've been so quiet with actual "tips" blogs, but I've been on the road with customer visits and user groups. I am currently in Dublin at the fantastic Irish Lotus User Group event. In case you missed the news on Ed's Blog, Lotus Notes 8 Beta 3 is now available for download. You

One of my favorite features in Orcas is the ability to leverage the ASP.NET Application services from any client application (ASP.NET, Ajax, WinForms, WPF, or even Silverlight!).. This allows you to do things like share a common membership, role management and profiles across a number of presentation tears. It also enables very easy roaming user state... Check out how easy it is to use the profile store... here I am using Windows Authentication, but of course you can use forms or your own system just as well. In fact any system can be rolled into the ASP.NET Auth system (there is a whole book on the subject ). Part 1: Create the web site. 1. In Orcas Beta1, Create a new ASP.NET Web Application 2. Fill in the profile section of the web.config...(read more)

Nikhil Kothari, an architect on the ASP.NET team, has been working in his spare time on a project called Script#. Essentially this allows an Ajax programmer to code in a strongly typed language like C# and compile their code into JavaScript. His original article can be accessed here . Recently he added ASP.NET AJAX support to Script# - you can read about this here . Hope you have fun with Script#! Thanks, -- Bash Read More......(read more)

On May 31, 2007, pre-release versions of Windows Vista will expire. If you are running a pre-release version of Windows Vista (Beta 2, RC1, or RC2) you will begin to receive notifications about the upcoming expiration on May 18, 2007. To avoid work disruption and the loss of data, it is strongly recommended that PC users running any of these pre-release versions of Windows Vista migrate their PCs to the final version of Windows Vista prior to May 31. To install the final version of Windows Vista on any of these pre-release versions of Windows Vista, you may purchase the desired Windows Vista Upgrade. The Windows Vista Upgrade must be the same language version as the pre-release version you are replacing. If you participated in the Customer Preview...(read more)

A while back I talked about Bringing new life to your VB6 apps with the Interop Forms Toolkit and now they have shipped Version 2.0... If you have a VB6 app and you are looking to take incremental advantage of .NET, you should check this out. Here is a cool example project where they leverage the WinForms MenuStrip and ToolStrip in a VB6 application! Very cool.. I can't wait to see what you do with it! Read More......(read more)

Last week we talked about getting URLs in LotusScript, and Jan-Piet Mens asked about a more cross-platform approach (actually, he also made the same request on his own blog a few months ago). So, I recycled some old code and wrote some new, and J-P helped me test and debug it. As a result, here is a database with some Java and LS2J code that allows you to easily make cross-platform GET and POST requests from Java or LotusScript:

• The URL Fetcher Database

The UrlFetcher Java library is pretty well commented, and should answer most of your questions about how everything works. The UrlFetcherLS library in LotusScript is just an LS2J wrapper around the Java stuff, and it's not nearly as well documented, but just read the comments in the Java class and you'll figure it out.

There are also a few sample agents that show how some of the functionality works. For example:

Option Public
Option Declare
Use "UrlFetcherLS"

Sub Initialize
	Dim fetcher As New UrlFetcher
	Print fetcher.getUrlAsString("http://www.nsftools.com")
End Sub

That's not too bad, is it? You can also get HTTP headers, set headers, add POST parameters, make proxy settings, and a few other things. I even have an example of making an SSL/HTTPS request, but that's Notes 7 only. Everything else should work in both Notes 6 and 7.

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One of the things I dislike about Lotus Notes is that URLs (links to web sites) are not clickable when you are editing a document. Most of the time this is not too big of a deal, but one place it does bother me is when I open an "Appointment" entry on my calendar which contains a URL. (link to a web conference, shared document, web site, etc). The problem is that Appointments (not meetings sent my someone else) open in "edit mode", so the links are not clickable. So a quick little tip to make those URLs clickable is to press CTRL+O which toggles the document back into "read mode".

CORRECTION: Okay, I'm a bonehead. It's actually Firefox 2.0 doing the spellchecking, not Gmail. I finally updated from Firefox 1.5 on the machine I usually check mail on. I thought about deleting this blog entry and pretending I never wrote it, but then I figured I'd just leave my tattered laundry out for everyone to see. What the heck.

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This is cool. There's inline spellcheck in Gmail Firefox -- using the familiar red dotted underline for unknown words and right-click to get suggestions:

Then again, maybe it's been there for a while (UPDATE: yes, it has...) and I've never noticed (UPDATE: stupid, stupid, stupid...). It works in Gmail chat too.

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Well, php|tek is over. It was a great conference and I'm really glad I went. This was my first PHP conference.

One of my main goals was to meet some of the folks at php|architect. I've been writing the Test Pattern column for them for over a year now. I was finally able to put faces to the names that I keep seeing in my email box. Actually, one of the cooler things about the conference was meeting people who I'm familiar with from online, either from forums, IRC, mailing lists or blogs.

I'd like to thank everyone who attended my sessions. Here are the slides from each session:

• Writing Maintainable PHP Code (PDF) - based on my March 2006 column.
• Dependency Injection (PDF) - based on my June 2006 column.
• Exceptional PHP (PDF) - based on my December 2006 column.

"... the PGA TOUR implemented IBM® Lotus® Sametime® software for industry-leading unified communications and collaboration, as well as custom collaborative applications built on IBM Lotus Domino® and IBM Lotus Notes® software."

If you have a list (bulleted, numbered, etc) with several entries and you want to re-arrange the values, instead of cutting and pasting them into a new order, you can move them up or down the list. You can perform a similar action with cells (or rows) in a table.

There's a new Domino Web Services article on developerWorks today: Engineering WS-I compliant Web Services for IBM Lotus Domino V8.

Even if you're not specifically interested in trying to make your Domino Web Services fully WS-I compliant, there are some great tips and gotchas in there, including:

• Web Services created on Notes/Domino 8.0 will not work on Domino 7 (however, the D7 Web Services work just fine on D8).
• Using arrays as method parameters in D7 only works when using the RPC/Encoded format (all formats work properly in D8). They do show a very interesting workaround using imported WSDL, though.
• Another workaround is to use a custom class as a parameter, with an array as a public member of the custom class (see below). However, in D8 a custom class that has an array as its only member is treated as an array in the WSDL, not as a proper complex data type (there has to be at least one other public member variable).
• Custom SOAP Fault subclasses are not returned properly in D7 (although they are in D8).
• Remember to set the server to "Run web agents concurrently" (I always forget that this isn't default behavior).

Regarding arrays as parameters using custom classes/complex data types, here's how I like to set that up:

Class PhoneNumbers
    Public phoneNumberArray() As String
    Public count As Integer
End Class

Class DirectoryAssistance
    Public Function reverseLookup (nums As PhoneNumbers) As NameList
        ...
    End Function
End Class

I mention this type of setup in one of my web services articles. The nice thing about this structure is that it's easy for the client to determine whether or not an array that is a return value is empty (count=0) or not -- you can decide for yourself if you want to enforce proper "count" values on the server side when accepting the class as a parameter.

Luckily, it also seems to have the fortunate side-effect of making the arrays work properly as method parameters for WSDL formats other than RPC/Encoded. I need to do some more testing to confirm, but I don't remember having problems before, and the new "WS-I Compliant Web Services" article seems to say that it's true.

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Here is one from the "If you can't laugh at yourself" category. That said, please take a look at IBM Lotus ActiveInsight, it really is a great product! Source: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2004887870516.gif

Not only do I get somebody to design sites now but also use somebody to create HTML. What's left for me to do? Be a manager!?