Wonderful WebMonkey Tools

If you’re ever forced to play WebMonkey (as I sadly am, at times), here are a few life-saving, must-have gadgets:

• Firefox (of course, you still need IE and possibly Opera to test for compatibility)
• www.csszengarden.com for inspiration
• Greg Taff’s Live CSS editing in-browser (rendr2)
• Chris Pederick’s Swiss-Army knife for the web… Web Developer Extension (I swear that there’s a tweazers in there somewhere

ajaxpatterns.org

ajaxpatterns.org is a great, community contributed wiki site. It started from the O’Reilly Ajax Design Patterns book, but it’s grown well beyond that.

Although it’s filled with, well, Ajax design patterns as one would expect, it’s also got plenty of coding examples and links to handy resources.

Probably the best contribution is a unified view of design pattern terminology. Sometimes just being able to assign a nice, generally accepted name to a technique is priceless.

Is “Asynchronous” Really Used in Ajax?

Great question posed by Ajaxian.

Although I find myself using Ajax primarily for “Periodic Refresh” (e.g., instant messaging-like polling), my main usage to date has been to send data to or effect change on the server. Not quite “fire-and-forget”, but more “fire-and-when-the-server-acknowledges-then-update-the-screen-acccordingly”.