Creating bookmarkable AJAX and Flash sites

Ajax and Flash apps are cool, funny, rich and interactive, but - there's always a but - they have some usability problems.

First of all, most Flash and Ajax sites disable the browser's Back button. If you think that the back button isn't important, think again. According to the W3C, the "back" button is second most used navigation tool, after clicking on hyper links.

Another problem that AJAX and Flash sites share is the inability to be bookmarked. Because the navigation takes place without refreshing the page and the URL doesn't change, it's impossible to save the link to certain page in the page for future reference. If you hit CTRL+D in your browser, you'll see that only the first page is bookmarked and you'll have to find the information you want in the site, again and again...

jBookmarker is a small Javascript framework developed by me some time ago that aims to solve those problems.

Why use jBookmarker?

  • jBookmarker is open source, you can use it free of charge according to the terms of the MIT license (basically you have to retain my copyright notice). If you don't want to retain my copyright notice, contact me and will discuss an alternative license ;)
  • jBookmarker was tested in the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari (the Windows version), but it should work with any browser!
  • jBookmarker is very scalable and can be used to manage multiple flash embeds and Ajax requests simultaneously
  • It uses a familiar way of storing information (like HTTP GET) and has a very steep learning curve.
  • It's really small. A compressed version of the script is less than 2K in size.
  • It's very unobtrusive. You can easily use jBookmarker with any Javascript framework and/or programming pattern.

Credits

Special thanks go to: