My First Dabble Into Ajax: dmiessler.com/time

By Daniel Miessler on December 28th, 2006: Tagged as Programming | Time | Tools

Given my new watch I have been checking the time a lot lately (it’s an obsession). Normally I go to time.gov, but I grew tired of doing that and decided to make my own resource for doing this (much like my /ip page for checking my outgoing IP address). I’ve been wanting to mess with Ajax anyway, so I figured this was a good opportunity.

Since my main server for this site synchronizes via NTP it’s quite accurate, so I decided to employ a bit of Ajax to create a dynamically updating time display that uses my server as the source. I started with Justin’s nifty template, simplified it a bit, made it start upon page load instead of through a button, and used some CSS to format it — pretty simple stuff really.

The result is precisely what I was looking for:

  1. A very accurate time display coming from my own site
  2. Doesn’t require Java (yuk)
  3. Allows you to watch the seconds tick by in real time (great for setting watches)
I love building things — no matter how simple.

dmiessler.com/time





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2 Comments »

  1. so, heres a point that I have always failed to understand. well ok lets start from the top.

    1. Ajax is not new.. the word is… Iv been making these things for years it used to be called Dhtml .. however the one thing thats different. is that it uses the XMLrequest function. Thats not exactly efficient , and Ill tell you why.. you can push but not pull, using an invisible applet, you can establish a server connection that is bi directional and multi threaded outside of the browsers sandbox. I mean to be honest, I don’t see the attraction when you look at the new Y! mail. its slow , awkward and yeah slow. the parts that make it work so well are the flash applets. flash also allows you to make server state connections (Tunnels). I should do something .. you know what we should colab on it, a pure play AJAX VS these 2 technologies. to underscore the performance variance.

    Comment by Richard Corsale — 1/3/2007 @ 11:17 pm

  2. you know.. looking at this closer I think that alot of the quirks come from the rendering speed of FF or IE ( IE clearly wins out in rendering speed ) the communication from server and allowing the threaded updates of interface components will speed things up considerably though. this could be an interesting OSS project

    Comment by Richard Corsale — 1/4/2007 @ 11:35 am

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