Implementing AJAX technology can be a hit or miss thing. Do it well and you’ll have users raving over the slickness it provides to the general user experience while if you mess it up, you’ll be at the receiving end of their wrath. Here are 24 tips to guide you with implementing AJAX technology within your web application.

Quick Tip: How to Extend Built-in Objects in JavaScript
Feb 5th, 2010 in JavaScript & AJAX, Screencasts by Jeffrey WayConstructor functions, like Array, offer a wide range of methods and properties that you can make use of. But have ever wished that one of these objects offered some method that isn’t built-in? Is there a way to do so yourself? Absolutely! Let’s see how.

What’s Changed in jQuery UI 1.8 – Plus Free Books!
Feb 5th, 2010 in JavaScript & AJAX by Dan WellmanjQuery UI 1.8 is currently at the release candidate stage and, barring the discovery of a major bug or flaw, will shortly become the current stable release of jQuery’s official UI library. So what has changed since the last current stable release of 1.7.2? One of the major differences of course is that the library now runs on the latest release of jQuery itself – version 1.4.1, but there have been many other changes including the addition of some great new components, which we’ll look at over the course of this article.

Working with RESTful Services in CodeIgniter
Feb 4th, 2010 in PHP by Philip SturgeonCodeIgniter is becoming well known for its power as a PHP based web application framework, but it’s not often that we see examples of it being used for anything else. Today we’ll learn how we can use CodeIgniter to create a RESTful API for your existing web applications, and demonstrate how to interact with your own API or other RESTful web-services, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Quick Tip: How to Use the New “Post-Thumbnail” Feature in WordPress 2.9
Feb 4th, 2010 in Screencasts, Wordpress by Jeffrey WayUp until the release of WordPress 2.9, setting up “post-image” support for your blog was a bit more tedious a task than it really needed to be. Luckily, that’s no longer an issue. I’ll show you how to get setup in this four minute video quick tip.

An In-Depth Overview of File Operations in PHP: New Plus Tutorial
Feb 3rd, 2010 in PHP, Plus by Burak GuzelIn this week’s Plus tutorial, we will learn how to work with file operations using PHP. This is one of the most fundamental subjects of server side programming in general. Files are used in web applications of all sizes. So let’s learn how to read, write, create, move, copy, delete files and more. Help give back to Nettuts+, and become a Plus member!

How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
Feb 3rd, 2010 in JavaScript & AJAX by Gavin HuangQUnit, developed by the jQuery team, is a great framework for unit testing your JavaScript. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce what QUnit specifically is, and why you should care about rigorously testing your code.

Facebook Hopes to Revolutionize PHP with “Hip Hop”
Feb 2nd, 2010 in News by Jeffrey WayLittle did we know that, for the last six months, Facebook has made use of a custom compiler for PHP that they refer to as “Hip Hop.” Essentially, it takes your PHP source code, and converts it into C++, and is then compiled with G++. As a result, they’ve managed to reduce their CPU usage by 50%. This project has apparently been in development for the last two years, but has only today been released to the community.

Highly Recommended Services and Apps: CodeCanyon Sponsors
Feb 2nd, 2010 in Web Roundups by Jeffrey WayAs most of you know by now, we’re hosting an enormous competition to celebrate the recent launch of CodeCanyon. The $6200 worth of prizes simply wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity of our sponsors. Luckily, I can also say that I 100% recommend each and every one of the services/products listed below.

The Quickest (and Best) Way to Create Forms: Wufoo
Feb 2nd, 2010 in Other by SiddharthWufoo is a web application which intends to simplify forms. Forms can generally be tedious to work with. You’d have to write the XHTML/CSS for the form elements, set up the back end code to capture all the data and then work on generating usable reports for it. Wufoo simplifies this entire process right from form creation to integrating it within your site through extensive theme support to producing pretty, usable reports for you to parse your data.
It even does a lot of advanced stuff, including web hooks and a proper API to access the collected data. Today, we’ll look at how to create a simple form with Wufoo, and then use the API to programmatically access and modify the data collected.












