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Article on web searching techniques

Searching the web is a crucial skill nowadays. I have tech friends who don’t buy technology books anymore because the quality of content for developers is so high. I still buy the occasional book documenting technology, but I also spend a lot of time searching the web for answers to tech questions. (Still using Google, though I’ve tried Yahoo! and IceRocket). One of the reaons I write this blog is to document answers I’ve found; another is to try to provide answers for others.

In that vein, here’s a great post on advanced Internet searching techniques. These tips seem especially useful when searching for terms that might be obnubilated (there’s my 5 dollar word for the day!) by ecommerce sites.

[tags]oblique search techniques[/tags]

Technology Technology and Society | moore |

XHR Data Caching and the Dojo Offline Toolkit

I’ve found caching JSON to be very useful when writing GWT components. Basically, the XMLHttpRequest will go to the browser cache first, and if the data is (relatively) static, you can direct the browser to cache it. More about caching in this post. If the browser hasn’t seen that url before, it will get it from the server. Using some kind of rewrite tool to make sure the data page looks like a normal HTML page tends to be good form.

But the Dojo Offline Toolkit promises to take things to a whole new level. It’ll be interesting if he succeeds. I took a look at his milestone list, and there are a number of ‘Figure Out’ steps, as you’d expect with something this ambitious and new. Well worth looking at if you write web applications of any kind.

[tags]data caching,dojo,offline web applications[/tags]

GWT Web Applications | moore |