California Ajax Solutions Team

www.CalAST.com

We have designed a number of web sites (or major parts of web sites) that are referenced here. Please note that web site artistry is not necessarily our strong point - we are engineers, not artists. (Probably, we need to fix that problem some day.) Our real expertise is in what we like to call technical web design. That is, we have in-depth knowledge of how the web works, how client-server computing works, how a given goal may best be achieved by partitioning a task between client-side and server-side code, and related areas.

That said, some of these sites are purely static (i.e., they are pages you just look at) and some are highly dynamic. Unfortunately for demonstration purposes, almost all the sites that have significant client-server interaction also require logins. There is not much we can do about this.

Clearly, you have already found our own web site. Here are some others, and notes on what we have contributed.

www.signlanguagepeople.com: This site is for a company that provides on-site ASL interpreters to medical, government, and other organizations. The style was determined by the company and developed in-house, but we created all the web pages and forms. This is primarily a static site with a reasonable number of forms that get submitted. In other words, there is nothing we consider particularly technically interesting, but we like the company and the help they provide to the deaf community.

www.svchc.org:This was a place holder web site for the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center. However, it has been removed as part of their development of an actual web site. It was supposed to be replaced by a "real" site long ago, but we just felt they needed some web presence. As a placeholder, this is a one-page site. However, since their clientele is largely Spanish-speaking, we use DOM manipulation to change the content based on clicking on a button. Nothing terribly difficult, of course, but we felt that the world is increasingly bilingual and more sites ought to respect this.

www.trackmywine.com:This is our test bed. (Unfortunately, this site is not currently online any more, although a private copy still exists.) Yes, it is a real working site that provides on-line database storage (MySQL) for the contents of your wine collection. But it is also where we test out new JavaScript objects and such. While it is not especially "pretty" (other than John Markarian's photography), it does use a reasonable amount of client-server design. It also demonstrates a few interesting techniques that we use frequently, such as creating a query using a form, sending it to the server where it is run against the database, retrieving the result set, and displaying it in tabular form with one radio button per item. (We call this a selector table.) The user can then select one item in the result set for further processing, which sends an Ajax request back to the server for implementation. We also have prototyped some graphics, like the pseudo-3D "chiclet" display of wine cellar contents.

www.languagepeople.com portal application (NOT the web site): You can't log in to this site, but the sister company of signlanguagepeople.com (above) provides a way for customers, interpreters (for spoken languages), and staff to connect to the company database and perform various tasks. Customers can log in and request job appointments, interpreters can log in and find jobs available to them, and staff can produce reports and perform maintenance operations. The database here is Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Most of the code here runs on the client side and is written in JavaScript, although there is a good deal of object-oriented code written in PHP on the server side to connect to the database. Beyond the classes representing database objects, there are innumerable small server scripts that perform various "Ajaxian" functions. This is a very big, fairly complex site that took about six months to design and implement, dealing with changing customer requirements along the way. This site also includes a candidate qualification system written in JavaScript. The company recruits constantly, and may have hundreds of applicants in the pipeline. The qualification web application lets them manage this process efficiently, with a good deal of automation.