There and Back Again

As a birthday present to myself I finished my last writing task (an Appendix containing AJAX libraries) on my book, Understanding AJAX.

The only thing I have left now is too review copy editing on the preface and appendixes and the back cover of the book.

Oh and I have to promote the book, and get the examples in a ready to ship state.

I found a handy tutorial of building a stock lookup plugin for Wordpress using HTML_AJAX. Shows how easy HTML_AJAX makes AJAX.

The only problem I see is the code won’t work in PHP5 since introspection will return the method name as GetQuote instead of getquote.

You can fix this by adding the following to the HTML_AJAX_Server instance.

// Create the HTML_AJAX Server
$objServer = new HTML_AJAX_Server();

// Set php4 case compatability so this code will work in 4 or 5
$objServer->ajax->php4CompatCase = true;

The other option too fix this is too set all the methods you want to register which is my prefered fix since it lets you have nice case in your JavaScript functions in php4

    // Create the HTML_AJAX Server
    $objServer = new HTML_AJAX_Server();

    // Create an instance of our stock quote class
    $objStockLookup = new StockQuote();

    // Register the stock quote object with the HTML_AJAX server
    $objServer->registerClass($objStockLookup,'StockQuote','GetQuote');

If you did this you’ll also have to update the JavaScript to use the cased version of the functions.

Not paying enough attention to dates I left myself 8 chapters of copy editing review to do in one night. The good news is I got it all done, which means all the heavy lifting for the book is done.

The bad news is i’ve been editing for 7 or 8 hours straight. The fun never ends.

Well thats not true, soon my part of the book creation will be done.

And then i get to setup demo’s advertise it, hmm a books the gift that keeps on giving

I’ve been working on reviewing copyedits and finishing up my last writing tasks this week.

I’m just finishing up my 4th chapter of copyedit reviews tonight, and I got one of the Appendices and most of the preface done last night. That just leaves 2 more appendices (Standalong JavaScript AJAX Library, and Server Tied AJAX libraries) some preface clean ups and a couple hundred pages of copy edit reviews before the book is done.

So close but yet so far away.

As you may have noticed I haven’t been bloggiing much lately, but there are a couple good reasons why.

First I’m getting married, planning the wedding tends to take a bit of time.

Second i’ve been working really hard to get a book about AJAX done.

The book is finally into production and I’m just starting to get some chapters back from the copy editor.

I do have one thing to share with you today, the books cover.
The complete title is: Understanding AJAX: Using JavaScript to Create Rich Internet
Applications
The ISBN is 0132216353

Also im still finishing up the books appendices which list AJAX libraries, so if you know of AJAX libs for various languages please let me know, im especially interested in AJAX libs for C#, Java, Perl, and Python I already keep up pretty good with all the PHP ones, and most of the non backend language specific ones.