Terry Chay on Remote Scripting (Ajax)

• Thu, 29 Sep 2005 at 02:58:48 GMT
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If you missed Terry Chay's OSCON talk this year, you're in luck - he has made the talk temporarily available from his web site. Because Brain Bulb has plenty of bandwidth and disk space, I offered to host the video there, so that it has a permanent home:

• http://brainbulb.com/talks/remote-scripting.mov (104.8 MB)

The video is great - it's really almost as good as seeing the talk live, because you get to see Terry speaking as well as his slides (the slides are shown every time there is a transition or some of Terry's famous Keynote magic happening). I guess it helps that Caitlin happens to be an expert at this video stuff. :-)

Here is Terry's original abstract:

Remote Scripting has been with us for five years now, but Google Gmail and Google Maps have brought it to the forefront. The XMLHTTPRequest object is the most common implementation of the Remote Scripting Pattern, which empowers the web developer to turn their websites into rich client-side applications; all it takes is a little bit of server-side programming and a whole lot of Javascript.

This talk hopes to answer: What do we gain by Remote Scripting? What do we lose? How does one implement it? What is the XMLHTTPRequest object? What are the pitfalls of Remote Scripting? Why do I hate all browsers?

In this talk, Chay shows how Plaxo has used Remote Scripting for the last year in its web client to create a dynamic web-based PIM. Through some toy demonstrations, Chay also shows how one can do this on the server-side using PHP and on the client-side using Javascript and a whole lot of patience.