Last night IFILM released a fancy new registration process and also soft-launched a new messageboard system. These projects have consumed my days (and occasionally my nights) for some time now, so the launch is a considerable relief.

Why is the registration noteworthy? It behaves a bit differently than most. Firstly, when you type information in a field, such as zipcode, and then move on to the next part of the form, you will receive instantaneous and unobtrusive feedback on whether you've entered a valid zip code. This is nice, but can do little more than determine whether you've entered the right number of characters. When entering a desired username, however, the form first checks that the username is valid (4-12 characters and starts with a letter), and then runs a remote script on the server to check the database for the existance of that username. The user will know almost instantly if that name is already registered and will have the ability to try a new one before submitting the form.

Go ahead: Try it out. Try entering my username, jcarlin, in the username field and click away. Pretty cool, huh?

This means no more submitting a long form only to find out the name you chose at the beginning is unavailable. No more clicking the back button and hoping that your browser has retained all your form data.

Here's another reason that this release is very important to me: This is my first product for IFILM.
I started at IFILM around two months ago. I am full time here, not consulting, and my role is hands-on, not advisory. Immediately after being briefed on the registration project, I demanded that we use Ajax to check for username and email availability on the front end. Some people got it and others are still wondering why I went to such great lengths to incorporate this feature into the registration process. I think it's turned out very well. I also did all of the creative, much of the IA, and all of the HTML/CSS, DHTML and Javascript you see on the page, so quite a bit is riding in this for me.
Here's to first impressions...

This last bit is somewhat technical and addresses the technique used to achieve this functionality. Suffice to say that it's not Ajax. If that interests you, read on. If not, go on ahead and register at IFILM and spend some time in the forums.

So, we didn't end use Ajax for remote scripting. Although the definition of Ajax has been argued over ferosciously, one thing that seems to be a requirement is the use of the XMLHttpRequest object. Instead, we used a JS RPC technique that IFILM had already been testing out. This was not very clean, but readily available. The end result looks to the user to be as transparent as Ajax might be, but required some DHTML tomfoolery that purists might frown upon.