Reinventing The Wheel
Isn’t it great when you think you’ve come up with something totally unique, to find out it’s already been done? Still, havn’t seen thism ake it’s way to the IF/ZB community as of yet, so maybe I’ll be the one to introduce it =D
The idea is known as JSON ((JavaScript Object Notation). What it does is allows you to dynamically retrieve new content on the same page, much like AJAX, but from remote servers. It is also only limited to retrieving javascript files. Considering it’s potential in our community where PHP isn’t allowed directly on the server, I’m suprised I haven’t seen it in use before.
Here’s an actual example of what it can do. I recently took upon me the task of recreating the Big Boards code and skin indexes, and part of my plan was to put all the entries into a database, which would allow us to add and edit much easier, as well as giving us the ability to do searches and such. I wanted the searches update on the page without a reload, which could have been done with AJAX, except I also needed it to load on Big Boards itself. Because AJAX cannot retrieve information from my server, and iframes are a bit clunky, I came up with this new (but already invented unknown to me) method of retrieving the data. How it work in my example, is whne the page loads a script is written with a php file as the source, with several GET parameters in the URL. Then, when the user changes the search parameters, the old script is removed and a new created in it’s place, overwriting the content area with new data. Everything is loaded seamlessly within a fraction of a second.
Further practical uses, perhaps a nicely working server based auto refreshing shoutbox? I dunno, I’ll leave that part to you guys, but it has great potential =)
Hopefully it’ll go away by then.
