It started with this Code Craft blog post on the Code Garden – an analogy that sucked less. It got me thinking and ranting about metaphors in software and metaphors of software. Designing your technical architecture with software, the XP “Metaphor” practice, metaphors for HCI, metaphors like those used in the Head First series and Ajax Patterns to explain concepts, metaphors to explain what software is to managers. Where do they make sense and where is it plain wrong to try and explain software with a metaphor.

22 minutes.

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts on patterns – where we’re at in 2007. Not a tutorial. Definitely not a tutorial.

Where did patterns come from? Not GoF, not Alexander.

Alexander, patterns, and architecture.

Patterns in the organisation – how can a pattern language pervade an organisation and help workers carry out its mission statement and operating principles? Different high level patterns (e.g. “People first” for one company, “Technology first” for another) mean different lower-level patterns (crude example: staff pattern in people-oriented firm – “managers come from HR” versus staff pattern in tech-oriented firm – “Managers become tech leadership”)

Wikis were literally built for patterns

Promoting and deploying patterns

Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category – http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2.

Thanks for listening!

This podcast covers eight patterns on debugging/diagnosis of Ajax Apps, as well as testing Ajax apps, and I’m joined by Craig Shoemaker from Polymorphic Podcast, also a co-author of “Beginning Ajax with ASP.NET”. After some announcements, the interview begans at 6:00. The podcast overall is 60 minutes.

<

p>

Ajax Diagnosis Patterns:

Logging

Debugging

DOM Inspection

Traffic Sniffing

<

p>

Ajax Testing Patterns:

Simulation Service

Browser-Side Test

Service Test

System Test

With the series now complete, the podcast will now resume regular Sotware As She’s Developed topics including but not limited to agile development, Ajax, the web, and usability. Also, more conversations – please drop me a line at [email protected] if you’d like to come drop in for a skype chat.

As always, credits on this podcast to My Morning Jacket for the lead-in track, “One Big Holiday”. All podcasts in this series licensed under CC.

Audio Note: Sorry about the noise at some stages in this recording – I now know a lot more about audio levelling (the problem of keeping both ends at the same level), but at the time this was recording, it turned out I had set Craig’s end at too low a volume. I used Levelator to level each end, leading to too much noise…next time I’ll need to pump up the volume at each end from the start. I’m also looking forward to resuming use of Bias SoundSoap, but there’s no easy way to get this running on an Intel Mac for now!

This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long.

This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472):

One-Second Spotlight

One-Second Mutation

One-Second Motion

Highlight

This is the second in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530).

The guest for this week is Dave Johnson of Nitobi (the Ajax component developers formerly known as E-Business Applications), widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book. Dave helps me walk through the patterns and offers plenty of great insights along the way. We mention Dave’s recent presentation a couple of times; here’s the PDF.

This 54-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 15, pp 389-444):

Drag-And-Drop

Sprite

Popup

Malleable Content

Microlink

Portlet

Status Area

Update Control

Virtual Workspace

And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We’ve already looked at the technical details, now we’re looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features.

I’m asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. Seeing patterns from someone else’s perspsective will make the discussion richer and hopefully cover more questions you might have as you’re listening to the podcast. The guest for this week is Andre Charland of E-Business Applications, widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book.

This 83-minute podcast covers nine patterns of Ajax widgets:

Slider Progress Indicator Drilldown Data Grid Rich Text Editor Suggestion Live Search Live Command-Line Live Form

The fourth and final podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. As always, the patterns are online at AjaxPatterns.org and covered in the book too, now available at Amazon. This 33-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Performance Optimisation:

Browser-Side Cache Maintain a local cache of information.

Guesstimate Instead of grabbing real data from the server, make a guesstimate that’s good enough for most user’s needs. ITunes Download Counter, GMail Storage Counter.

Multi-Stage Download Quickly download the page structure with a standard request, then populate it with further requests.

Predictive Fetch Anticipate likely user actions and pre-load the required data.

Fat Client Create a rich, browser-based, client by peforming remote calls only when there is no way to achieve the same effect in the browser.

Pseudo-Threading Use a timer and a worker queue to process jobs without the blocking application flow.

Code Compression Compress code on the server, preferably not on the fly.

(Note that the last two are recent additions to the wiki and just stubs at this stage.)

Okay, here endeth the series. I will soon be starting up a new series on the next group of patterns (Part 5 in the book): Functionality and Usability Patterns. There will be a change in the format, one I hope you’ll enjoy!

The third podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. The 29-minute podcast covers five patterns. As with the previous podcast, there is reason for concern about the audio quality herein. Firstly, three patterns on DOM population – taking server response data and displaying it or storing it in the DOM:

XML Data Island Retain XML responses as “XML Data Islands”, nodes within the HTML DOM.

Browser-Side XSLT Apply XSLT to convert XML Messages into XHTML.

Browser-Side Templating Produce browser-side templates and call on a suitable browser-side framework to render them as HTML.

The second group of patterns (representing a different chapter in the Ajax Design Patterns book) are a couple of generic Javascript patterns to make the code more maintainable and portable:

Server-Side Code Generation Automatically generate HTML and Javascript from server-side code.

Cross-Browser Component Create cross-browser components, allowing programmers to reuse them without regard for browser compatibility.

Continuing from the previous podcast (cough 12 weeks ago), more programming patterns. Unfortunately, this recording (and the next one) went pear-shaped. Sorry. I do, however, recommend them to those of you who’ve been wondering what an Ajax talk would have sounded like in crackly 1930s recording technology, and one in which the speaker has a severe cold. FYI The level was too low and it didn’t correct very well…maybe one day, I’ll re-record, but for now I’d prefer to just get them out there as they have been sitting in the libsyn archive for many weeks.

The 40-minute podcast covers the following patterns:

Call Tracking Accommodate busy user behaviour by

allocating a new XMLHttpRequest object for each request. See Richard Schwartz’s blog entry.Note: Pending some

rewrite to take into account request-locking etc.

Periodic Refresh The browser refreshs volatile information by periodically polling the server.

Submission Throttling Instead of submitting upon each Javascript event, retain the data in a local buffer and upload it periodically.

Explicit Submission Instead of submitting upon each Javascript event, require the user to explicitly request it, e.g. submit upon clicking a button.

Distributed Events Keep objects synchronised with an event mechanism.

Cross-Domain Proxy Allow the browser to communicate with other domains by server-based mediation.

This podcast covers six patterns on Browser-Server Dialogue: Call Tracking, Periodic Refresh, Submission Throttling, Explicit Submission, Distributed Events,

Thanks for your feedback since last time. Good, bad, or ugly, it’s all welcome – in the comments for this podcast or [email protected].