Rob Gonda

It's become very popular lately, even though it's not exactly new. It's been possible to use the concept behind AJAX since browsers introduced the XMLHttpRequest function in 1999. AJAX isn't a technology, or a language, and there's no recipe to implement it; it's just a combination of various components to achieve something you otherwise couldn't: asynchronous http requests. However, since early 2005, when Google and Flickr popularized the concept, its use has grown rapidly. The name AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It uses the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest function to create a tunnel from the client's browser to the server and transmit information back and forth without having to refresh the page. The data travels in XML format because it transmits complex data types over clear text. AJAX uses XHTML for the data presentation of the view layer, DOM, sho... (more)

Rob Gonda's ColdFusion Blog: ajaxCFC with Security and Debugging Released

ajaxCFC now supports built-in improved security, enforcing get or posts verbs, and also optionally checks for the http-referer to match your site. These two checks will prevent a third party from monitoring HTTP packets and trying to call them manually by pasting the full AJAX request to a browser. I personally always Firefox and Live HTTP headers debug my AJAX applications and I recommend using get methods and allow blank referers for development environments; but you need to be able to lock it down for production. And talking about development, don't you hate when you think you're... (more)

Nitobi AJAX Components for ColdFusion 8 Beta

Nitobi (http://www.nitobi.com.) has announced it will support the ColdFusion 8 platform in its suite of enterprise AJAX components. The ColdFusion edition of Nitobi Grid and Combobox offers support to ColdFusion 8 Beta, released today by Adobe, as well as older versions of Coldfusion. The implementation enables a simple backwards-compatible CFINCLUDE style XML API for reading and writing the Nitobi compressed XML schema for AJAX transport. Nitobi also released a CFC version of their Coldfusion library, and Dreamweaver support for it"s AJAX components. Download the Nitobi Coldfus... (more)

AJAX: Making the HTML User Experience Almost As Pleasant as Flash

AJAX can make the HTML user experience almost as pleasant as Flash. The main advantage of Flash, in spite of its vector animations, is that you never reload the page. Flash Remoting allows you to interface with the server in the background and AJAX does exactly the same for HTML pages. In my previous article, "What's AJAX?" (CFDJ, Vol. 7, issue 9), I covered the basics of AJAX - everything from setting it up, all the way to having it running in an MVC design with basic functionality. Thus far, we have only sent and received simple objects, which is good way to understand the pri... (more)

Rob Gonda's AJAX Blog: "ajaxCFC update for DRWUtil.AddRows"

ajaxCFC update for DRWUtil.AddRowsRelated Categories: ajax, ajaxCFC, Coldfusion, JS/DHTML A recent message in the ajaxCFC group asked about the DRWUtil.addRows() function; the truth is that I had never used it. I include the utils library because there are other elements that I find useful, but I had never given the addRows a try. Enough said, since I include the file, I guess I need to support the built-in functionality, but the addRows out-of-the-box was accepting arrays and objects. I serialize the ColdFusion queries into a more complex object which was not recognized by the a... (more)