Last week I gave a talk at the UK ColdFusion User Group on the subject of Enhancing User Interfaces With Ajax and Coldfusion.
In fact, the talk was sufficiently general for the “..and Coldfusion” bit to be dropped – there’s virtually no CF in it. Hopefully it will be of interest to any developer currently using Ajax or thinking of doing so, regardless of programming language
The main point I wanted to get across was this
although the recent explosion of interest in all things Ajax has indeed enabled developers to approach user interface design in a new way – or, as the marketroids would have it, Re-think the User Experience Paradigm ™" – there are still sound reasons for approaching this in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way
In other words
- DON’T design an interface that’s completely dependent on Ajax, and then try to reverse-engineer accessibility
- DO start with an interface that already works for your lowest common denominator, then look at how Ajax can enhance it.
I also looked at how we’ve used it to enhance interfaces in an application that is yet to go live but has been giving us warm fuzzy feelings for weeks, plus I went into some detail about usability and accessibility considerations when using Ajax
You can download the presentation slides here
Enhancing User Interfaces With Ajax – presentationI also went through the process of adding Google Suggest-esque functionality to a simple search form. You can download the example code (ColdFusion + HTML + JS + CSS) here
Ajax Demo Code – Search Suggest
Wonderful article. Question: Does AJAX work on Coldfusion 5.0?
Thankyou Bhushan! In response to your question, AJAX is a client-side approach and just requires a recent browser (details of minimum browser versions are in the presentation) with Javascript enabled. It’s independent of server-side technology such as Coldfusion.
I really like this Alistair. It certainly helped me in my limited understanding of Ajax and its potential to improve the user experience of the web.
I agree with your advocacy of an evolutionary approach. I am wondering what the implications might be for the knowledge community as we move towards a new phase of developmental work focussed on improving the user experience. What role for Ajax?
Glad to be of service, Rowan – I think there is a lot than can be done with AJAX on the KC, so long as we always bear in mind the potential accessibility implications. I’ll look forward to discussing v.2.2 at great length…:)
Its looks to be a good work, but the ppt link on this page is dead or file is removed. can any one give me the new URL of the file.
please mail me the info about the file. nagender_gs@hotmail.com