Ajax Pattern

http://ajaxpatterns.org/Patterns

You may have heard of design pattern in software development. There're patterns like Singleton, Composite and Strategy in software development. For Ajax application development, we also have some specific patterns.

The above Wiki site shows a list of pattern specifically for Ajax development. They range from high level (application feature) to low level (software architecture). There are real world examples stated in the site for some of the patterns. For example, you can find Google Suggest in the Suggest pattern.

Among those patterns, I'm particularly interested Periodic Refresh and Unique URLs. Periodic Refresh is one of the AJAX application feature I use most of the time (in GMail and Google Reader). It is really useful in helping me keeping up-to-date and alerted.

Unique URLs may not seem to be useful to you. But when you try more AJAX application, you will find that bookmarking an exact URL in it. In the users' point of view, the bookmarking of these URLs would be preferable. To solve this mismatch between technology and user requirement, the pattern Unique URLs is proposed. It make use of the "#" character in URL (like what we did for HTML anchors), which I think is a bit tricky but a bright idea.

Next time, when we are going to develop an AJAX application, we may go there and see if it give us some new idea on how should our application look like.