Kurt Cagle

In Star Trek, Scotty – James Montgomery Scott – was my favorite character, perhaps inevitably. Spock was always the cool and collected uber-genius, inscrutable and forced into an emotional straightjacket, and while the parallels to the real politik of the time are obvious, to me Spock has always been the epitome of the pure ivory tower researcher. Scotty, on the other hand, was the enginee , in many ways the ultimate hacker. Spock may have been able to tell you what properties of dilithium would induce warp speed, but Scotty knew exactly how to crack the damn crystals in such a way as to eke out that last 0.5 warp factor necessary to escape the baddies chasing the Enterprise. Scotty knew about estimates – and how much you could pad an estimate to insure that you got the correct time necessary to complete your work down to the minute... (more)

Rethinking Web Services, Pert 1

I've been at this game for a while, a fact that has been hammered into my awareness with distressing frequency of late. I worked with Hollerith cards in college, running my programs through a machine with a distressing tendency to shred my carefully typed code into so much confetti if the deck was not perfectly aligned in the bin. I can remember a time when mentioning the object-oriented programming paradigm was a sure invitation to fisticuffs between its adherents and the old guard. In fact, SQL hadn't even been conceived when I went through college. I guess that puts me into t... (more)

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Instantiating the Bindings

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developing AJAX applications. Instantiating the Bindings In Mozilla, the XBL binding language (an XML language) is used to associate bindings with their respective elements, with these tied in via CSS. Un... (more)

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Some Basic JavaScript Tools

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developing AJAX applications. Some Basic JavaScript Tools Learning JavaScript can be a pain, largely because in most cases you're either limited to working in the browser's command line or building JavaSc... (more)

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Working with JavaScript Objects

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developing AJAX applications. Working with JavaScript Objects Objects are possibly an odd place to start when talking about JavaScript, but if you understand exactly how JavaScript handles objects, you'll h... (more)