Automate and extend Firefox with the Chickenfoot add-on

Tony Patton in his article on Chickenfoot speaks about manipulating the DOM of a webpage through which you can give additional features to a web page.

Chickenfoot is a Firefox add-on that allows you to automate user actions within the browser environment. It also lets you extend the browser interface to provide additional features to a Web page.

Before I delve into how this add-on can make your Web development work easier, I thought I’d take a moment to share the answer to the question I bet you’re asking yourself (I know I was): Why is it called Chickenfoot? Here is the answer from the Chickenfoot site:

“Chickenfoot is a game that you can play with dominoes. Since Chickenfoot does much of its work by manipulating the Document Object Model, or DOM, of a web page, Chickenfoot the Firefox extension is like a toy that lets you play with the DOMinoes of the web.”

Access the full article here

Chickenfoot is available as a free download. When you click the downloaded file, Chickenfoot is installed via the Firefox Add-ons dialog box. After installation, it is available as a sidebar selection (View | Sidebar). After you enable the sidebar, Chickenfoot appears on the left side of the browser adjacent to where pages load.

The top portion of the Chickenfoot sidebar contains a JavaScript editor that allows you to enter JavaScript as you would within a Web page. In addition, you can enter commands from the JavaScript superset that is part of Chickenfoot.

You may enter multiple code windows within the JavaScript editor. There are buttons at the top of the JavaScript editor that you can use to open/save scripts, create new scripts, and execute and stop scripts.

For more information about Chickenfoot scripts, check out the Chickenfoot Script Repository.

Developing Ajax-based Java applications

Developing Ajax-based Java applications

ABSTRACT:

This Tech Talk provides an overview of the ICEfaces framework, which is designed to add AJAX to JSF based on a technology called Direct-to-DOM Rendering. This approach allows a web application to be rendered entirely on the server side. The browser essentially acts as a remote control to a server-side rendering of the DOM – making the AJAX capabilities transparent to the developer. Developers can work in a pure JSF programming model, have no exposure to JavaScript development or any of the low-level intricacies of AJAX and still get the full rich web capability.