Ajax Hacks

Credits

About the Author

Bruce Perry is an independent software developer and writer, and the author of O’Reilly’s Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook. Since 1996, he has developed web applications and databases for various nonprofits, design and marketing firms, as well as publishers. In his spare time, Perry is an active age-group triathlete and has cycled extensively in the Swiss Alps. He lives in the Newburyport, Massachusetts area with his wife Stacy LeBaron, daughter Rachel, and son Scott.

Contributors

• Micah Dubinko served as an editor and author of the XForms 1.0 W3C specification, and he began participating in the XForms effort in September 1999, nine months before the official Working Group was chartered. Micah received an InfoWorld Innovator award in 2004. He is the author of O’Reilly’s XForms Essentials, available online at http://www.xformsinstitute.com. Currently, Micah works for Yahoo! in California as a senior research developer.

• Curt Hibbs is a senior software developer in St. Louis with more than 30 years’ experience in platforms, languages, and technologies too numerous to list. With a keen (and always searching) eye for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive, he has become very active in the Ruby development community.

• Brad Neuberg has done extensive work in the open source community, contributing code to Mozilla, JXTA, the Jakarta Feed Parser, and more. His experience includes developing on Wall Street with distributed systems, n-tier design, and J2EE. As senior software engineer at Rojo Networks, Brad focused on next-generation aggregators, the blogosphere, MySQL, Ajax, and Lucene. Recent work includes consulting for the Internet Archive to create an Ajax book reader; focusing on Ajax/DHTML open source frameworks, including the Really Simple History library recently adopted by Google; and working with the Ajax Massive Storage System (AMASS) and dojo.storage, which allow web applications to permanently and securely store megabytes of data.

• Premshree Pillai is a Technical Yahoo!. He hacks (maintains the Ruby APIs for Yahoo! Web Services, Flickr, Technorati, etc.), writes (“Ruby Corner,” a column for Linux For You), and talks (at various conferences) about Ruby in his free time. He has previously contributed to O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook and Yahoo! Hacks, and to the ACM’s Crossroads.

• Mark Pruett is a programmer and writer living in Virginia, where he works for a Fortune 500 energy company. He’s the author of two books and numerous articles on programming and technology. Mark received his master of science degree in computer science from Virginia Commonwealth University.

• Sean Snider is a senior web software engineer for Yahoo! and the Web User Interface Team manager for Yahoo! Music Unlimited. Sean has been building Ajax applications and rich web sites for over eight years within the music, video game, and e-commerce industries, for companies such as Electronic Arts (EA Sports, http://www.easports.com), Musicmatch (Musicmatch Jukebox, http://www.musicmatch.com), and iVillage.com.

• Buzzword compliant since 1985, Jason Levitt is an expert in optimal diverse coherent hybrid multi-tier heuristic effects. His recent book on web services (http://www.awsbook.com) is decidely buzzword-free, but nonetheless paradigm busting. A journalist and programmer, he’s currently a Technical Evangelist for Yahoo!, helping manage the flow of web services into the real world. Though he has no blog, you can let loose a stream of his geekage by putting “Jason Levitt” (use the quotes) into your favorite search engine.

Acknowledgments

My family members play the most important role in giving life to a book idea, nurturing its writing, and making its final publication possible. First, I thank my parents Anne and Robert Perry, who had the wisdom to settle in Concord, Massachusetts, where books are valued perhaps more than in any other town in the United States. They promoted reading during my childhood as an activity above most all others, perhaps second only to getting outside and appreciating the environment and Mother Nature.

Second, I would like to thank my wife Stacy and children Rachel and Scott, who exhibited great patience while dealing with the modest crises of publication deadlines, such as the temporary loss of their husband and father to the inner sanctorum of a home office, or the occasional over-cooking of the peas as I raced back to my lap top to complete some unfinished paragraph.

I’d like to thank my O’Reilly editor Simon St.Laurent, who tirelessly steered this book to publication from beginning to end, and offered cogent advice during the entire duration of writing, despite the challenging time line. This book greatly benefited from the technical reviews initiated by Micah Dubinko, Shelley Powers, Thinakorn Tabtieng, and Michael Buffington. They demonstrated impressive versatility in taking both a long view of the book’s topic, as well as focusing on numerous fine-grained details that required corrections or greater exposition.