electronic.alchemy :: New AJAX sample application for Fins
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New AJAX sample application for Fins

Created by hww3. Last updated by hww3, 20 years ago. Version #8.

I was surfing around the other day and ran across a little screencast[1] on the Ruby on Rails website. The point of the screencast was basically demonstrating how to create an AJAX application in a few minutes using Rails and Prototype (a javascript library). Well, obviously Ruby doesn't have the market cornered on ease of development. We in the Pike world have options, too.

So, last night I threw together the Fins[2] equivalent that searches SmugMug[3] for images and returns the results to you. It's functionally equivalent to the Rails demo application that uses Flickr.

A running instance of the sample app can be found here:

[external]http://buoy.riverweb.com:9098/

The code is available here:

[external]http://hww3.riverweb.com/dist/Fins/samples

You'll note that most of the bulk of the download consists of the Dojo[4] javascript library we're using to achieve some of the client side functionality. You'll also need to download Fins, which can be found in the directory immediately above. Simply untar both files, and run

./fin_serve.pike -p yourportnumber /path/to/smugmug

If you don't have the Public.Image.SmugMug and Public.Web.RSS modules, this app won't do much for you, but that's sort of beside the point.

The only other difference between the amount of work required to achieve the pike version is that you're responsible for doing a lot of the javascript work yourself. I'm not sure how I feel about the Rails way of doing things, which is to say there's a lot of magic involved. I suppose it might be worthwhile to build some convenience functions that make some of this easier.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

[1] [external]http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/flickr-rails-ajax.mov
[2] [external]http://hww3.riverweb.com/space/pike/Fins
[3] [external]http://www.smugmug.com
[4] [external]http://www.dojotoolkit.org

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