New Ajax-Enhanced Cartoon Viewer
dePIXion studios and InToon.com have launched a new Ajax-enhanced cartoon viewer at http://www.intoon.com, the website home of Mike Keefe, Editorial Cartoonist for the Denver Post. The new page employs Adobe's Coldfusion and Spry frameworks to deliver 6 years of political cartoon viewing and art shopping — all without refreshing the browser page.
Driving it all are a database backend and subscription web services supplied by EditorialCartoonists.com, the website of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC.) Thanks to Coldfusion software residing on the AAEC website (also developed by dePIXion studios), Keefe emails his daily cartoon file (in high-resolution format) to an automated-image processing script and the cartoon appears minutes later on both sites, complete with title, keyword and date tags — all stored as meta data in the cartoon file. The script also archives the high-resolution file on a remote ftp server.
As defined on Wikipedia, "Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability."
There are several frameworks available for developing Ajax applications. Spry, Adobe's framework, is still in beta, but was chosen for this application because of its easy integration with Coldfusion.
The use of Coldfusion in conjunction with Ajax allowed dePIXion studios to minimize two of the problems inherent in the Ajax technology. The first issue is browser compatibility. The technology relies on Javascript, which may be implemented differently by different browsers or versions of a particular browser. To overcome this problem the cartoon viewer uses a combination of techniques to deliver the content in the appropriate format. If you visit the site with a browser that is not supported, the script displays a non-Ajax version of the content. This also helps with a second problem with Ajax: search engine optimization. Because search engines cannot read the content of the Ajax page, they are shown a non-javascript version of the page. The beauty is that the same links that the search engines see (and index,) will display the new Ajax page if viewed in a supported browser.
For more information on dePIXion studios or InToon.com, please contact:
Anita Austin
President, dePIXion studios
Contact Form
303.670.7822
dePIXion studios is a website and web applications development company specializing in Coldfusion and database-driven sites.
Browsers that can view our new format are:
- Firefox
- IE 6 and higher
- Safari 2
- Opera 9
If you visit our site with an older browser, or with javascript turned off, you will see the old format.