Amazon has certainly nailed the usability features for repeat users, such as ‘Your Recently Viewed Items’, but sadly eBay doesn’t provide this simple feature yet, without actively creating Watchlists after signing in.
However, buyers searching eBay via Auction Alfie are provided with their recent searches to make it even quicker to view previously viewed items.
The technical bit – how does it work?
Auction Alfie uses a technology called JINC which was originally coined by prominent Perl Euro-hacker, Leon Brocard (acme).
JINC stands for ‘JSON in cookies’, but I can’t stop myself from saying ‘JINCs’ so I’ll be referring to it as that from now on (it’s much more catchy anyway – sorry Leon!).
JINCs is a lightweight, client-side method for creating dynamic content with Javascript after storing data in a cookie as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It is a particularly elegant way of dealing with information in cookies as you can eval() the JSON string with one line to retrieve your original data structure.
With the current push for a cleaner and more extensible javascript coding style by people like the Yahoo! Developer Network, JINCs integrates extremely well with this clean way of coding.
The nitty-gritty:
First install the small JSON Javascript library code and some cookie handling code.
Then, once you have created your object you can parse it as a JSON string and store this string in the cookie:
var MYGLOBALOBJECT = new Object();
MYGLOBALOBJECT.TestArray = new Array("hello", "world");
MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie = MYGLOBALOBJECT.toJSONString();
Set_Cookie("mytestcookie",MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie ,expires,'/');
Then to retrieve it:
MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie = Get_Cookie("mytestcookie");
if(MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie != null){
MYGLOBALOBJECT.TestArray = eval('('+MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie+')');
}
You now have your original data structure to play with. Enjoy.
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