GIGO: words unreadable aloud

ColdFusion, Flash, Sean Corfield, and Ajax

Margaret mentioned her cousin's son, Paul -- I think that's technically a first cousin once removed -- who has a weblog at http://pjk.us . I didn't know you could get .us domain names at that level. Cool.

A ColdFusion fan. Macromedia makes Flash, which powers a lot of the nice-looking animations on the web, and I gather that ColdFusion is a web server and development environment for developing websites, with good support for developing Flash-based or Flash-rich websites. I haven't done much with Flash, but I can see the appeal. Here is the ColdFusion FAQ. Macromedia is lucky to have Sean Corfield working for them. I met him a few times at the C++ standards meetings a decade ago.

Macromedia started using the term "MX" a couple of years ago. My guess is that it stands for "More eXtreme". Their FAQ says: What is MX?

We use "MX" to identify the new products that are part of the Macromedia MX product family. Each product that bears the MX mark is major new version. Together, the Macromedia MX products make it possible to build a new generation of Internet solutions.

There is a lot of buzz around the blogosphere this past month or two about "Ajax" -- an acronym meaning "Asynchronous Javascript And XML-Http-Request". This is what helps the maps in Google Local, and the suggestions in Google Suggest, show up quickly. The next few months could be quite interesting for Macromedia, as Ajax uses standard interfaces, and does a little bit of the kinds of things that Flash does a lot of. Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path wrote a very good introduction to Ajax. And I think he or his company coined the term "Ajax". The techniques have been around for a while, but there is finally enough critical mass of browsers that support Javascript well enough for this to be a big opportunity.

Cool Javascript stuff:

http://tmp.i.am/2005/02/24.html I mention Lisp. And yesterday I finally saw the link to a Lisp-like language that generates Javascript code. I'll locate it and edit this. (On edit: It was Manuel Odendahl's "Parenscript", but it appears that something else already got that name (on sourceforge, even), so Odendahl's thing will likely change its name.)
http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
http://www.trimpath.com/project/wiki/JavaScriptTemplates Steve Yen has some amazing Javascript stuff -- a full spreadsheet, an HTML template processor, and an SQL-like Query language (I don't know if the subjects of the queries are XML or JSON, or something else; ought to read their page about it.)

9:53:32 PM comment/