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Developing a FireFox toolbar (Javascript) to access MySQL?

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:34 am
by Josh1billion
I was reading this article which is a tutorial on developing Firefox toolbars. It appears to use Javascript for the main code. Now I don't know much about Javascript at all, I've barely ever used it.

Is it possible to create a toolbar that would pass a username/password (of the user who is using the toolbar), and look up that user in the "users" table, make sure the password is correct, and then return a certain value "unread_message_count" to the toolbar? So that I could have a toolbar which shows a user's number of unread inbox messages.

Would this be possible, and if so, would it be easy to implement? How might I go about getting started on this?

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 3:49 pm
by Kieran Huggins
Sure it could be done. Try doing it just in Javascript first, then move it into an extension after it works.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 8:07 pm
by Josh1billion
I see. Do you have any pointers on which functions to use for Javascript access of MySQL? I think this would require Ajax but I'm not sure- and honestly I hardly know what Ajax is. :P

edit:
A quick google for ajax mysql and I found this page: http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ajax- ... tabase.php
Is this leading me in the right direction? By the sound of it, I would be using the red-fonted code found in that code snippet to get the information.. passing the username and password (that the user entered into the toolbar) into the ajax-example.php file as a query string.

Am I on the right track here?

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 8:41 pm
by Kieran Huggins
A good friend of mine is working on Jester (actually, he's giving a talk at The Ajax Experience in Boston this week).

I just found out what it was it the other day but it looks downright wicked, and, possibly what you're looking for.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 8:52 pm
by Josh1billion
Jester sounds interesting, but I don't quite understand what it is.. a Javascript implementation of Rails's "REST protocol", but I've never worked with Rails so what is this REST protocol? I checked Wikipedia's article on the protocol and it doesn't say anything about MySQL.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 9:27 pm
by Kieran Huggins
A data model represents a row in a table, as well as that row's relationships to other rows, as an object.

REST is a way of giving HTTP access to those models in a predictable way.

Jester is a Javascript tool to give you local (javascript) access to a remote data model that's represented in a RESTful way.

It's essentially the closest thing to having database access / ActiveResource directly in Javascript without a local DB server.

I fully encourage you to learn each of the above techniques as they're incredibly empowering in their own rights, and even more useful together!

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 9:29 pm
by Josh1billion
Hmm sounds a little complicated.. maybe that tutorial I linked earlier might be the best/easiest way to go.