6 posts tagged “ajax”

I've been fleshing out Trizzle with more pages for browsing the Trizzle database (the "Trizzbase.") Most of the pages are simple CRUD implementations-no further AJAX coolness to reveal, I'm afraid-but the pages are necessary, both for the user and also for my own debugging.

• The view tag page now shows albums and playlists that have been associated with that tag in addition to artists. (example: nodepression)
  
• The recent playlists page shows, not unsurprisingly, recent playlists entered into Trizzle.
• I've started implementing lazy registration. When you first hit a Trizzle page a user ID is created and stored in both the database, and also a cookie. This means that playlists created in the system will be associated with the user, even if the ui doesn't necessarily reveal that.

I'm working right now architecting an integrated search/browse page that will provide a single ui for searching and browsing playlists, artists, albums, songs and tags. However, I've learned enough about AJAX to know that a page like this needs to have some planning happen before actual coding, lest things spiral out of control very quickly.

Work has been proceeding on the Trizzle Project-quite a bit of work, actually. Most significantly, Trizzle now has a tag cloud. How does one enter tags into Trizzle, though? Right now you can only get tags in the system by tagging a playlist when you enter it in the PlaylistFormatter. When you do that, the tags applied to the playlist carry over to the songs. Obviously that's quite roundabout, and better solutions will be forthcoming. Eventually Trizzle will offer tools for easy tagging of one's music library, but that will have to wait until I can start developing the extension for Songbird.

Recently some people have started using the term Comet to describe a new style of AJAX development, in which data is pushed to the client instead of being pulled (polled) by the web app.

Will this cause confusion if Comet ends up being the shipping name of SixApart's product? As seems likely since that's the name you guys have been using publicly for it.

I continue to hone my AJAX skillz. I built a live search page that uses XMLhttp to send and receive search requests and results. I wanted to provide an iTunes like experience for people querying the Trizzle database. Click the link below and see if I succeeded.

Search the Trizzbase!

Late Saturday night coding. Added live search to my Trizzle music database page:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/artists-list.php

It's impressively fast. I haven't even added a timer function, but the search function seems to keep up with my typing.

Right now it doesn't fit in very well with the original function of the page, which was to browse the Trizzle database, so I need to actually break out it out into its own page. What I'm actually going to do is make an iTunes-like page where the user can type in a search string, and have a listing of all songs, albums and artists that match it. I already wrote the SQL query, which is this:

select * from Songs s, Albums al, Artists ar, ArtistToAlbum ata where s.AlbumID = al.AlbumID and al.AlbumID = ata.AlbumID and ata.ArtistID = ar.ArtistID and
((s.SongTitle like '%morn%') or (ar.ArtistName  like '%morn%') or (al.AlbumTitle like '%morn%')) order by ar.ArtistName, al.AlbumTitle, s.SongTitle

Now I just need to make a page that dispalys it nicely.

today-Professional AJAX by WROX Publishing. I would have inserted it into this post except the Amazon lookup for books is busted as usual. It seems to be really, really unreliable for books-I've only gotten it to work three times out of the about twenty I've tried i t.

Using my knowledge of AJAX so far, I made this:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/artists-list.php

Not terribly useful, but still cool, especially how fast it loads the data.

This is my last post of the day unfortunately. Have to get up tomorrow and be at my contracting gig at 9am (ugh) for another epic day of rebooting Windows.