Grauw’s blog

Bookmarks in AJAX applications

August 22nd, 2005

Oi,

I wrote an article for my employer about making AJAX applications bookmarkable. As you might already know, an AJAX application has a single URL, and is thus more difficult to bookmark. The first half of the article describes the solution to this problem, and then it goes on to explain how to use our technology to apply that solution in Backbase applications.

It’s pretty cool to have this article of mine online, I’m quite proud of it :). If you have any comments, be sure to let me know. Questions are best asked on the Backbase forum. Read more at the following (direct ^_^) link:

» Bookmarks and the back button in AJAX applications

Grauw

Comments

by Martijn at 2005-08-28 20:38

“Your web browser is not compatible with the primary Backbase site. Find out which browsers are supported: Compatible browsers.”

I’m using latest Firefox trunk build.
No idea why I get that message.

Weird... by Grauw at 2005-08-29 21:45

Strange, it should work. Maybe the ‘a’ in the new version number on the trunk confused the old-browser-detection? I can reproduce it, will ask the R&D people tomorrow about it.

Problem solved. by Grauw at 2005-08-30 11:14

I fixed it, the problem was user agent detection indeed. It has nothing to do with the Backbase software, the problem was in the PHP code of the site. We were using the get_browser() PHP function which depended on an browscap.ini file to filter out user agents which we don’t support to send them to the plain fallback site. The browscap.ini file we used can be plucked somewhere off the net and, as it turns out, uses a totally anal user agent detection system. Really, don’t get me started.

Anyway, this browscap.ini file we were using in particular didn’t contain a future-proof detection for Firefox at all, which was the cause of this problem. One might think the presence of the word ‘Firefox’ in the UA string, and the fact that 99% of the UA string has remained unchanged, would be sufficient indication that the visitor is using Firefox!

Anyways, I fixed it, so you can follow the link now. Note by the way that the article is also available on the fallback site (somewhere at the bottom of the menu), so you still could’ve found it :).

by Martijn at 2005-08-30 11:26

Well, after I read that error message, I didn’t bother reading the rest of the page ;)
I can see it now, thanks!

And again... by Martijn at 2005-11-07 18:33

And again, I’m getting this message, while using the latest nightly trunk build...

Browscap.ini… ugh. by Grauw at 2005-11-07 20:44

Yeah, we’ll get rid of the whole browscap.ini thing soon. It’s too unflexible.

In the meanwhile, you can visit the site through this link, which disables the browser detection.