Chapter 4. Power Hacks for Web Developers

Hacks 2842

Web development these days increasingly involves making connections with cool and useful web APIs, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Weather.com. The first five hacks in this chapter cover some uses of these APIs; "Use Ajax with a Yahoo! Maps and GeoURL Mash-up" [Hack #32] integrates data from the GeoURL service. The growth of Ajax techniques also makes it necessary to take some applications off-line (for example, when moving from the terminal to an airliner with a laptop), and thus requires persistent storage of data on the client side. To this end, this chapter includes a hack describing the new open source client storage tool called AMASS. It also delves into the typical tasks that inhabit a web developer's calendar, such as adding email capabilities to Ajax applications, accessing and creating HTTP cookies, debugging the DOM objects in Ajax software, and finding out the browser's locale information. Finally, this chapter's last hack creates an "Ajaxy" RSS feed reader. (RSSReally Simple Syndication, in one of its flavorsis an XML file format that plays an important role at a number of news- and issue-oriented web sites.)