AjaxDaddy - Ajax examples and free Ajax scripts

Posted on May 22, 2008 at 5:10 am

Where can you go for free applets to give your website some Web 2.0 goodness? AjaxDaddy.com of course.

If you use AJAX already for your Web 2.0 projects or are just thinking about it and need information, check out this one-stop source of AJAX plug-ins. In addition to free code that covers things from fish-eye effects for icon browsing to auto completion text fields Ajaxdaddy shows you the code, and gives you a sandbox area to get a feel for how the widget performs and to do some experimentation.

AJAX is one of the tools that has made Web 2.0 applications possible, fostering the type of rich and interactive user experience we have all come to expect in webspace, not just our desktop environments. AJAX allows pages to exchange data with the client without an entire page refresh, which would be awkward and slow performance. It’s AJAX which powers such powerful and popular desktop look-alikes as Google Apps.

Surf over to AjaxDaddy and look around the home page, checking out the wide variety of free web 2.0 applets that are available for download. You’re greeted by a crowded scrolling page chock full of applets to try out. Granted, the page could be better constructed - its an eyeful to navigate through. The site does tag the applets, and you can click the tags if you are looking for something in particular.

I am going to try out a Mac OS X-like dock applet. What I need is something that let’s me lay out a set of widget icons for my page which will magnify smoothly as the user passes the mouse over each icon. So I click on the “menu” tag above, and I see AjaxDaddy does have an applet for me to try out that could be just right!

This sounds right - but I am going to check it out on AjaxDaddy’s sandbox area before I bother to download it and start my own customizations. To do that, I just click and follow the link to the applet Css Dock Menu. Once there I can either immediately choose to get detailed documentation and code for the applet, as below, or try it out first:

But the best part of AjaxDaddy is that I can first check out how the applet works - the user interface, and performance aspects. I can even mess with some of the html code to see how it reacts to my potential changes. I can see from the sandbox area that it does indeed look very Mac dock-like, which I think my readers will find very cool. And the function makes an icon-bar much more useful due to the fisheye magnification effect as well as the ability to place text under the magnified icon.

I can also see from playing with it that the performance is smooth - like a real desktop app. This applet is also simple to use which is important to me - since I’m not a heavy-duty coder myself. I provide the .png image files for my icons and pretty-much use the applet as it is.

So go have a look over at AjaxDaddy.com and get some of their free web 2.0 lovin’ for yourself! Oh, and if you have something nifty to share that’s not already there, please let them know - this will be a useful clearinghouse for anything new and useful in AJAX.

Pete Kushmeider, writer and blogger

Technorati Tags: AJAX, AjaxDaddy.com, Free AJAX applets

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