At work I continue to work on some involved javascript using some ajax along the way. My general experience is that javascript stuff is harder to do then normal php coding. Ajax just adds complexity. The reason why doing user dynamic user interface in javascript is due to asynchronous nature of the browser. Everything can happen out of order. Dealing with events is also a problem. For example on any div you may get a mouse over event fired after the mouse out event has already fired. Things are generally chaotic in nature. If you try to use ajax using it asynchronously makes things even more chaotic and not much easier. This is why in the few places that I need to retrieve data from the server I just go with a synchronous request. Even though it may freeze the browser for a sec or two at least it will lead to less bugs in the code.

In browser news. Microsoft announced that they will distribute IE7 as a high priority update to Windows XP users. This is actually good news. I wish they done it as a critical upgrade. Its critical for me dammit. How much money have companies wasted in development effort just working around IE6 bugs. Must add up to billions. But that is how it goes. Firefox 1.0 has not been an angel in that regard either. I have come across plenty of bugs in that browser that caused me plenty of grief. Sometimes I just wish it was never released in the first place, or at least not without the automatic upgrade feature. So far i had not come across any major bugs in Firefox 1.5.

Coming up I got to talk about APC and some page caching javascript I will put releasing soon.