Do your surveys

QuestionForm, a Portuguese service, is a powerful tool and innovative service, from my perspective.

Citing from their site:

questionform is a new web application for creating, publishing and analysing multi-language online surveys and forms.

They have two types of accounts, a paid account and a free account. I started to test the free account (may be I’ll be buying one paid account soon).
In the free account you have only 2 surveys available.

I started to sign up, the signup process is very simple and intuitive. By siging up you get a sub-domain from QuestionForm. Mine is jpereira.questionform.com
A minor point at sign up process. When asked for the e-mail I could read “must be a valid e-mail address, confirmation will be required”. However, I haven’t any email in my inbox for this purpose, although I can use the service.

When you create a new survey, you get an URI . The URIs is the way every service will be known in the future . I created the “MyFirstSurvey” and you can reach it here .
The interface is very, very simple with drag&drop features and a properties box per element. Nice done!!.
One of the minor bugs I found is about the back button on the Browser. Unfortunately is a hard-to-deal problem in this kind of applications. I’ve lost a survey by accidentally pressing the “Backspace” key when the focus was in the wrong place
However, they have great features. You can publish your survey at your pages or blogs, send invitation by e-mail, redirect the pages, apply themes, use multilinguages, see statistics and much more, though in beta version.
The features of redirecting pages and applying themes will be only available in the paid version.
The usability? I loved it, but I’m not the right person to talk about it. Maybe Ivo can give a shot here.

Thanks for the nice tool.
Bottom line: I feel that a private area would be great, where participants could only fill the surveys by identifying themselves, by a code generated by the tool and automatically sent to the participants email, in the invitation. May be also planned?

Thanks to Hugo Silva for pointing this service in his post about iPhone .

Try it, it’s free.

regards,

JP

Written by j.pereira on January 17th, 2007 with no comments.
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AJAX, part two

So what? In part one you’ve only learned how to change the source of an IFRAME with Javascript. Big deal! Till now you only have seen the J from AJAX (J from Javascript) and a kind of simulated asynchronous call. But from now on it’s up to our imagination to take this little concept a further step.

In this part I’ll show a more Web App like sample, using the basic concept from my last post.

Let’s start to define something more useful and real. You’re building now a simple application where you have a left side menu with the name of some companies, and in the right side some information regarding the selected company.

Your layout will be as simple as the following picture:

In your left side you have some names of companies (Am I being repetitive?) and in the right side you have some information regarding the company you choose in the left.

You don’t want your user to see a flickering when he clicks on a company name, and you must retrieve the data from a server.

How can the concept, in my last post, help you?

Keep reading. I’ve to set here a break in the page.

(more…)

Written by j.pereira on January 13th, 2007 with 7 comments.
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AJAX, part one

This is my attempt to do a tutorial on AJAX :)

Look how cool the Google Reader interface is, he said. I did already knew the cool web interfaces Google uses, in its Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Map, etc..

This is what can be achieved with the so-called AJAX. AJAX is a specification, although there’s no formal organization behind it. AJAX is built around the concept of asynchronous calls to the server through HTTP. As all of you know, HTTP is a stateless command-response protocol which is based on the GET command, mainly. So you can only get data if you ask your server for it.

The GET command can retrieve almost any kind of data from the server, in most of the cases it retrieves HTML code, which is interpreted by Web Browsers.

Web Browsers interpret the data retrieved from the server and render it, letting you see pages like this one. Wait! Can any kind of data from be retrieved from the server? Virtually yes. The data retrieved in respect to a GET Command, is interpreted by the client by analysing, first, the MIME type in the header field, and then apply the correct message handler to the message. Usually the MIME type is text/html, telling the browser that the data contained in the response is encoded ion text­/html format.

Anyway, you probably know the RFC 2616 better than me.

This is (was) the main problem in the Web Applications because you’re not able to maintain a state in the client and you are also unable to control what you’re rendering on your client without asking to a server to control how the data should be displayed.

If an event occurs in the server, you can’t know about it while you don’t have a refresh (a GET to the server) in the page.

Ok, you can have a browser doing a auto refresh to the page, by setting the parameter refresh in the header, but when the refresh timer expires the web browser force a new GET to the server and you stay still, because you loose all the data from your browser and you, as user, can’t do anything. It also causes a flickering in your page.

Also, you can only set one URL in the refresh command, and this URL does not know anything about user state. A tons of problems, as you know.

That’s why AJAX was pronounced for the first time by Jesse James Garrett in public. To get a “simulated” asynchronous call to a Web Server, most of the times, the element IFRAME is used. The content of an IFrame can be requested to a server using javascript, by changing the field src.

Try this example. You can see the source by choosing the option “View Source” from your web browser :)

Ignore the fact that no validation are being made, haven’t time, and is out of scope of this post.

Can you now start to imagine what you can get from this powerful concept?

That’s enough for today.

Next time, I’ll go into more interesting things you can do with this concept, and then introduce you some frameworks to work with AJAX.

Written by j.pereira on January 12th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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Would you trust in Wikipedia?

Founded in 2001, by Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia now counts with around 3.7 billion articles in 200 different languages. The Wikipedia project goes beyond an Open Source project, but rather an open community of knowledge. The essence of Wikipedia is that everyone can contribute (with the effortless process of editing a document) with his/her knowledge about any topic.

The fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, writing about anything, put a bit of controversial weight on Wikipedia’s shoulders. Many experts - and non-experts - advocate that Wikipedia can’t be used as a trusted source of knowledge. Why we ask? The answer is obvious. Every one can write anything about any topic. Even I could write an Wikipedia entry reporting that I’m the new president of United States of America (I wouldn’t do that because I’m not an asshole, so I’m not entitled to be president of the EUA ).

Given this, and all the controversial talk around Wikipedia, the Nature, a weekly journal of science, set up an investigation about the accuracy of both Wikipedia and, the well know encyclopaedia, Britannica. From Wikipedia and Britannica, 42 articles were chosen and given to independent experts on the subjects. The articles were analysed by experts in order to find errors on these articles and then measure the accuracy of Wikipedia and Britannica.

The results? They were amazing.

The Britannica is head to head with Wikipedia. From the 42 articles were found 3 errors for Britannica and 4 errors for Wikipedia. So, you can still say that Britannica is more accurate, but wait. At the day after the results get public, Wikipedia community fixed the errors found by during the test, while Britannica has to wait till next edition :) If the test runs again the day after the results, Wikipedia would beat the Britannica for sure.

Still thinking that Wikipedia can't be a trusted source of knowledge?

Written by j.pereira on December 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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del.ici.us

I recently started to use del.ici.us as my bookmarks tool. It's a great example of the WEB 2.0. When I save some link, I can immediately know if the link I saved is really important or not, by seeing how many people already posted the same link.

I've started a few days ago with my del.ici.us and I don't have a lot of links, but, at least for me, the ones there are wonderful, and a must read.

Come on, let's share also you bookmarks. You can find mine here.

Written by j.pereira on December 20th, 2006 with no comments.
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