Bustling CS3216 life

It's been more than two weeks since we started working on the Facebook application. We got a bit stuck on the layout design and couldn't proceed with implementing other functions and prototype testing. I feel a bit afraid that we'll be screwed up for the last days before submission. But I have faith in it. As engineers' philosophy, our productivity shoots up exponentially right before the deadline.

I still remember last Sunday, I spent a whole night reading on and testing Ajax tutorial examples. Ajax, abbreviation for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is not a new programming language, but a technique to create fast and dynamic web pages. In short, it's based on client-side and allows users to update certain parts of the webpage with reloading it, which is typically done for webpages written purely with PHP and HTML. It allows web pages to be updated asynchronously with the server behind the scenes. And this is based on a so-called XMLHttpRequest Object that is used to exchange data with a server. The object is supported by most of the modern internet browsers and there are also ways to solve the problem with old browsers like IE5/6 which do not support the object.

Though I still don't fully understand the GET/POST request type and open()/send() functions of the object, and I have no idea what is going on inside the object, by following the examples, I successfully transferred the invitation data of our app into the MySQL database dynamically from the app interface. And this is widely applicable in situations where users interact with the webpages by loading and submitting data, with minimum number of times to reload the page.

Later within this week, I began learning JQuery library to add some animation effects to our app. The learning is yet over and probably we need one more Sunday to push our app a big step forward, which is half an hour away, tomorrow.

Night.