I am never really bleeding edge with anything, I simply do not have the time to be and I am not sure I have the patience to be so either, but that is a different story.
Yesterday I wrote my first AJAX snippet, I got a few AJAX books some months ago and yesterday I got my first AJAX assignment. I am taking over the implementation of an application with one of my clients, a large project with several applications and much to do.
So I downloaded the examples from the book and some of the code I had been pointed to by collegues (such as jQuery and dhtmlxTree.
So looking at the examples and scimming through Foundations of AJAX I located what I needed and got it up and running, I looked at the Java example provided and reimplemented it as a Perl CGI script instead and *ding* I had a asyncronous date validation implemented.
So now I have the VERY basics of AJAX somewhat in place, at least for the callback features and communication with server-side scripts.
So now I am moving on to the next hurdle a prototype of a AJAX application integrated with my clients framework (I think I have mentioned this framework before, I was one of the lead architects). Anyway it is a mod_perl based web framework, based on XSL, XML and Perl, multiple frontend and application servers.
So the idea would be to get AJAX running on the frontend and communicating with the existing applications servers and accessing their XML responding methods.
When have implemented something similar to the date validator in this framework end to end, I can move on the the real task at hand. Integrating a tree view with asyncronous updating per node with an existing application.
I have ideas for other of the applications, which could gain something from either DHTML or AJAX features, so now I just need to convince the client, but lets first see how the prototype goes.
