We will hold an online, free presentation showing what you can do with Gaia Ajax when building next generation web applications in a fast, lightfoot and intelligent way. Jan Blomquist will demonstrate the power of our latest 3.6 version and why abstracting away JavaScript and developing in a managed language is crucial for time-to-market.

5 winners will be chosen at random from the list of attendees. Each of them will win an annual subscription of Gaia Ajax (worth $595).

Wednesday March 10, 2010, 11:00AM (PST)
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LIDNUG event info

Direct link to Live Meeting

Recently we decided to add a searching feature for the different sites we run on gaiaware.net: main site, blogs, forum, tracker, docs and API reference. We wanted to be able to search each site separately and still have all the results presented in a intuitive way. And of course, it should be built using Gaia Ajax, so it could be quickly developed (our customers say they increase the productivity by 30-50% on the ASP.NET platform when using Gaia Ajax) and give a responsive and ajaxified user experience.

We have purchased a Google Site Search subscription so we don't have to reinvent the wheel again and make our own site spider. The Google Site Search gives us the search results in XML, and we can parse and present them in any way we would like.

The challenge: multiple search sources with ASP.NET

Since we wanted to present the results from each sub site in separate sections, we needed to overcome some limitations of what Google Site Search gives us. E.g. you can return max 20 results per search. Since we wanted to separate the results in each sub domain (e.g. forum.gaiaware.net) we needed to use the useful "site:" parameter in a Google query. That meant that we needed to fire off 5-6 Google searches for each search we executed on our own page. Our immediate concern was how long time it would take to perform so many Google searches, return them, parse them and present them on our ASP.NET page.

More...

One of the global leaders of statistics and analysis, Synovate, is publishing one of the most popular surveys in Norway. It's called Norsk Monitor (Norwegian Monitor) and will reveal your views on life, social relations and simple societal questions. The results are published every other year. A subset of this larger survey is converted into a 10 questions survey, called MikroMonitor. The chosen technology was Gaia Ajax. 

Although the application is fairly simple and the target audience is norwegians, it was written fully server side with the use of C#. No JavaScript was used at all. If you want to see the survey in action, you can either click here or view the YouTube video below

Video

Using Gaia Ajax it was fairly straightforward to add the clickable images and make them highlighted as they are selected.

Code Example

A simple example of the markup looks like this

   1:  <asp:Repeater ID="repAnswerAlts" runat="server" onitemcommand="itc">

   2:      <ItemTemplate>

   3:          <gaia:ImageButton 

   4:              CssClass="smilies"

   5:              ID="btnAnswer"  

   6:              runat="server"

   7:              CommandName="AnswerClicked" 

   8:               />

   9:      </ItemTemplate>

  10:  </asp:Repeater>