I absolutely adore writing JavaScript. Like many things with many people, I’m not very good at it and probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it, but I just can’t get enough of doing it.

I was fortunate enough to spend about half of the past few days at work (while not testing a massive number of bug fixes) writing a big pile of JavaScript. You may have seen me present the TweetMeme Chrome Extension a few weeks ago now at the Chrome developer event in London.

I’ve been taking the opportunity to brush up on my JavaScript knowledge and techniques. One thing I have discovered is that building robust, reliable, bug-free JavaScript is a lot more difficult than in a lot of other languages.

Yep, there we go, I said it. There is nothing that I hate more than AJAX.

Not very “Web 2.0″ of me, is it? Well, not exactly.

That’s because this rant isn’t about asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is about people who use AJAX interchangeably with “Javascript”, who think that AJAX means their website looks good, and who think that AJAX should be used for every single thing on their site.

As some of you may or may not know (if you’re on my Twitter its highly likely you do), I spent 2 months and a bit of this summer working at a technology startup called Huddle in London.

Huddle’s product is an online collaboration and document sharing website with an emphasis on social working, and could be described as a cool cross between the best of Sharepoint and Facebook, after being cleaned up and made to look lovely. You can check out their site at

During my time developing Adobe Air applications, I have come across numerous online resources for support, and I have listed them here for reference.

Air Developer Center – useful starting point on the Adobe site