Gallery

Lost in translation

Posted on 24 Oct 2005 at 16:05

Paul Ockenden looks at multilingual requirements for global websites, while Mark Newton continues his server move to Canary Wharf

AJAX

We wrote about AJAX in issue 132 and it seems that the web world is starting to explode with articles on the subject. There's even a podcast about it at www.scalabledevelopment.com and only the other day Microsoft's MSDN newsletter covered the topic. While AJAX technology can be used with ASP, it really comes into its own with PHP or ASP.NET, while ASP.NET 2 offers a different way of achieving the same result.

AJAX offers a way of getting fresh data to update a web page without that page being blanked and redrawn as it is on a conventional website (where clicking a link means the browser window clears as the new page is fetched). With AJAX, the fetching of data is done in the background using XmlHTTPFetch, and once it's returned from the server the data gets drawn onto the existing web page using JavaScript. We'll be seeing a lot of uses for this technology in the future, and once ASP.NET 2 ships it should become even easier.

Flash testing

With any website, it's important to test using various browsers in an attempt to catch and correct any errors that users might experience. We've talked about this in many previous articles, but an area that sometimes gets overlooked concerns Flash websites. Such sites almost always expect you to upgrade to the latest version of Flash, which can be done automatically. However, in some corporate networks this upgrade isn't possible because of the permissions set up on the workstations, whose users aren't allowed to install new programs. If you want to make sure your website still works in such situations, it's a good idea to test it against various older versions of the Flash engine. You'll need somewhere from where you can download and install these previous versions, and those nice people at Macromedia have provided just that at www.macromedia.com. There are versions for Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers and for Windows and Apple operating systems.

Success?

And finally, an update on Mark's progress in configuring the development server. After going for a nice drive in the country to clear his head, he decided to uninstall ASP.NET and the FrontPage extensions, and the server was then rebooted. Next, the HTML remote admin screen was tried to see if that worked, which it did, as this is apparently a requirement. Next, the FrontPage 2002 extensions were installed and the server rebooted again. These were then tested by applying FrontPage extensions to an existing development website, which worked fine, so another reboot was done just to be sure. Now, finally, ASP.NET was installed from the 'Add Windows components' option in Control Panel 'Add/Remove programs'. Then, guess what? A reboot! Mark then made sure ASP.NET was allowed as a web server extension by checking IIS Management Tool and all seemed fine. There's still a small issue with Visual Studio Projects, but Mark is working on that. At least the development server is working now and Mark has put the hammer back in the shed.