[ale] Using Gmail with Opera; AJAX

[aaron]

[ I know, I know... Opera isn't open source...
...but Opera does provide free to use, freely distributable version packages 
for a variety of Linux distros, in addition to being impressively compact 
code with support for a lot of PDA devices, so: ]

I just updated to Opera 8.01 on my various Linux and Mac OSeX boxes and wanted 
to report that this latest version is now playing _very_ nicely with Gmail!  

Previous Opera versions were having problems addressing facets of the XML and 
JavaScript techniques that the newest Google services like Gmail and 
Maps.Google.com are employing.

I learned at a recent AJUG meeting that the web technologies in question have 
been available on most browsers for quite a while, but the coding techniques 
were only very recently defined and named under the internet buzzword of 
"AJAX", the acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML .

If you have played at all with the Maps.Google interface, you know that  these 
AJAX techniques provide really fast user feedback by removing the need to 
post, send and redraw entire HTML pages. From a Geek perspective, this is 
cool stuff, but its not all _that_ cryptic or hard to employ.

Embellishing on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX>:

==
AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a term describing a web 
development technique for creating interactive web applications using a 
combination of HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting 
information. The Document Object Model is manipulated through JavaScript to 
dynamically display and interact with the information presented. Like DHTML 
or LAMP, AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the 
use of a group of technologies together.

The techniques rely primarily on the XMLHttpRequest object ( oddly, a 
non-standard function introduced in early Micro$haft Internet Exploiter 
versions) to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web 
server. The techniques most commonly use XML and XSLT, although AJAX 
applications can use other technologies, including preformatted HTML, plain 
text, JSON and JSON-RPC as alternatives to XML/XSLT.

AJAX applications use web browsers that support the above technologies as a 
platform to run on. Browsers that support these technologies include Mozilla, 
Firefox, Internet Exploiter, Opera, Konqueror and Safari.  [ with the 
exception that  Opera versions prior to 8.01 did not support XSL formatting 
objects, and neither did it natively support XSLT transformations. 
<http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/> ].
==

If there's substantial interest in this and y'all feel its appropriate to the 
ALE venue, I might be able to arrange a presentation on AJAX for an upcoming 
ALE Central meeting.  (At the very least, I could play back my recording of 
the AJUG presentation.) Please send thoughts and responses to this idea 
privately <aaron at pd.org> and I'll proceed accordingly.

peace
aaron