Web

Last month there were a couple of stories that said that the steadily increase of Firefox usage was brought to a halt and maybe was on its way down. These stories apparently tend to come out when Firefox' share is down half a percent. Today the new figures came in from netapplications.com, the company that originated those stories, and (surprise), the usage is up again. Firefox has a 14.18% share in February, the highest share it ever had on netapplications.

Now what should we make of that? Nothing, I guess. Anyway, here are some interesting figures.

Surprisingly when you search for search with Google, the first hit you'll get is MSN search. Microsoft knows how to optimize for Google, I guess. With that stuff going on of Blake Ross blaming Google to be pushing its own products at the cost of competitors, this wasn't something I expected.

Today I had a look at jQuery. This JavaScript library has been on my to-do list for a couple of months now. It appealed to me because of its small size and because it can be used to query for elements in your html quite easily. And that should make some JavaScript tasks quite easy. The reason I look at it now is because I wanted to use it to submit a form.

The problem with normal forms is that they use the POST method. And of course, if you do not allow client side caching, this will give the well known 'page has expired' message when you navigate back and forth through the site. If you don't want the pop-up and you do not want caching, the option of using an AJAX call is a nice alternative. jQuery has a standard forms plugin (also quite small), and takes care of some cross browser issues you might run into.

The AJAX call can use the POST method, because it isn't used in navigation. Basically, you submit a form and wait for the result to come back and then (if you want) go the next page using a normal GET method. After a submit, you can fully process the request and show the result on the same page, or store the result or request in the session and display the result on the next page. Because I didn't want to make too many changes to the application, I chose the latter.

In the forms.js file itself there are a lot of examples on how to use it. In my case it looks something like this:

function submitForm() {
  var options = {
       success: function() {
           location.href='resultPage.jsp'
       }
  };
  $('#myForm').ajaxSubmit(options);
  return false;
}
$(function() {
  $('#myForm').submit(submitForm);
});

Nice, and very easy to do. Also have a look at this example.