How to update the browser on the status of an AJAX process

Websites with AJAX elements are a defacto standard on the web and have been for quite some time. AJAX allows you to run a request on the server without actually leaving the page the user is on, executing it asynchronously while the browser waits for a response.

One big problem with this is that if the process takes more than a few seconds, there’s no built in methods in the AJAX standards to receive content before the entire request is complete, so how do we let the browser know the status of the process on the server, if we can’t stream information to the browser using AJAX? We’ll be addressing this problem in this post.

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Creating polaroids using Flickr API (also how to space rotated elements correctly)

Hanging Polaroids

Some might say polaroids are a bit overdone when it comes to displaying your photos, but I’m going to be using the Flickr API to get a selection of images and hang them on a virtual line.

There’s a bit more to this though, as I’ll be showing you how to calculate the actual widths of our hanging polaroids so that we can fit as many on the line as possible without having them overlap. This may sound trivial, but when we’re hanging our pictures at an angle it becomes slightly more complex.

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Using jQuery BBQ to create an instant bookmarkable search with AJAX

jQuery BBQ creates a nice interface for manipulating your url without having to reload the page. This means that you can create bookmarkable content without having to reload the page every time you want to change a url parameter. This is great for creating AJAX based forms that can display results instantly while still being bookmarkable.

A lot of sites use this sort of functionality already. A good example of this is grooveshark, which uses the hash part of a url to store parameters. Drupal also includes jQuery BBQ in its base package. Page reloads take a long time, so in today’s world of responsive web pages and impatient users, putting url parameters in the hash part of a url makes a lot of sense.

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