Blaze New Media

I’ve been reading the new book “Agile Web Development with Rails” over the last day or two, and I have been truly amazed with what this language and framework combination can achieve.

It’s refreshing to see a web language that is truly object oriented, and a framework that strictly adheres to the “Model, View, Controller” method of development.

If you haven’t heard of Ruby on Rails yet, then you should go and check out this online video of a simple blogging application being produced in 15 mins. Take note that not a single line of SQL is written. Truly remarkable.

I’ll be writing more about rails once I have finished the book and have a grasp of everything it has to offer as a framework. So far, it seems to be killing PHP development in every area.

This is a seriously cool piece of work. It’s one of those gems that you find now and again and think “how in the world did they do that?”

Colour Mod is a colour selector tool that can be used on a website to let users dynamically change stylesheet colour settings. One of it’s most practical applications that I’ve seen so far is on Color Combos, where you can change any colour within a combo dynamically without any page refreshes.

The entire tool is coded in javascript & css, and surprisingly (thanks to some proprietary DirectX alpha filters) works in IE6.0 ( although not IE5 Mac). Anyway, what really caught my eye was the actual color palette, where you can drag a bullet around just like you do in Photoshop. The effect was so seamless that it took me several uses to realize that this was all thanks with some very creative javascript – and not just a regular form element.

The tool can be downloaded and plugged into your own website ( which also gives people like me a chance to study just how on earth it was done ) as well as a dashboard widget for OS X 10.4.

Even if you don’t end up using this tool, just take a look at how it is done. Clever and creative, I love it.

I’ve spent much of the weekend looking into this new approach to web applications. It’s been thrust into the limelight over the past couple of months and I was wondering how exactly do you say “Ajax”?

Now being from England and a huge fan of football (yes, soccer….) I’m pretty familiar with the dutch football team Ajax and the way that this is pronounced – ‘Ai-yax’.

Then again, there’s a trusty all purpose cleaner in the UK also called Ajax – pronounced ‘Ay-jax’.

So what’s it to be? Does anyone really care?

No, probably not. I just don’t want to sound like a complete tit when i bring it up in conversation for the first time.