markItUp! - Lightweight Text Editor

When Jay Salvat set out to build markItUp!, he wasn't trying to build the next FCKEditor or TinyMCE. He just wanted to build a simple editor that could allow developers to add enhanced markup capability to textarea elements.
markItUp! is a JavaScript plugin built on the jQuery library. It allows you to turn any textarea into [...]

Comet Roundup: Gazing, Battles, and Protocols

There has beern a lot of great Comet content recently, especially from Comet Daily of course :)
First, they gazed at their own Comets talking about maturity, together with a maturity grid. Since the project leads and vendors are grading themselves, you have to do due diligence :)
Joe Walker has written up 3 styles of API [...]

JavaScript and jQuery Talk

John Resig has published his JavaScript and jQuery talk that he gave at Northeastern. What does he cover?

I covered the basics of JavaScript - targeted to a Computer Science major (in the case of the students at NU, they learn Scheme and Java so I emphasized the subject matter to that audience). I did a [...]

HotRuby: Run Ruby on a JavaScript interpreter?

This is from the "wow, really?" department. HotRuby is an implementation of Ruby in JavaScript!
The way it works is that a HotRuby "VM" takes the resulting output from YARV and can grok it via JSON:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:



VM::InstructionSequence.compile(cgi['src'], "src", 1, OutputCompileOption).to_a.to_json




Thus, you can embed Ruby by doing something like this:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


        <script type="text/ruby">


class Pi


  [...]

Where is Firefox on Acid 3? Here.

Some people have been surprised to not hear much from Mozilla around Acid 3. WebKit and Opera are duking it out, but what about Firefox?
Mike Shaver of Mozilla has posted on his views that Acid 3 is a missed opportunity and is pretty damning of the whole thing:

Ian’s Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not [...]

The importance of bandwidth versus latency

Between cranking on Acid 3 tests, the WebKit crew has explained some issues in Optimizing Page Loading in the Web Browser:

It is well understood that page loading speed in a web browser is limited by the available connection bandwidth. However, it turns out bandwidth is not the only limiting factor and in many cases it [...]

Adobe Photoshop Express Launches

The launch of Adobe Photoshop Express has been much anticipated. We are seeing the move of a large software company going from desktop to Web for a major application.
As Erick Schonfeld points out "Photoshop Express is by no means just Photoshop ported onto the web."
I am a big fan of Picnik and for awhile was [...]

WebKit Passes Acid3

WebKit has a public build that gets 100/100 in Acid3.
I can just see the quibbling between the Apple and Opera teams now, but instead of making this an American election vote, ("but I WON THE POPULAR VOTE" "but that popular vote doesn't matter!") lets just say "great job" to both and move on? :)

Acid 3: Opera Passed?

It appears that Opera has passed Acid 3:

Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support.
Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those [...]

TraceTool: Now with open source JavaScript client

Thierry Parent has released a new version of TraceTool, his open source tracer program, with a JavaScript client.

The javascript TraceTool API is a cross browser (tested under Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2 and Opera for mobile) and cross domain tracing solution (maybe the first one). The viewer can be installed on any [...]

Progress Is N+1

Alex Russell isn’t talking about the N+1 select problem when he references the Joel Spolsky piece on IE 8.
We want to applaud the IE 8 team for the work that they have done, but also keep pushing to make sure that it really happens:

I was reminded of a discussion last Friday where I voiced my [...]

Will IE8 & HTML5 Make RSH Irrelevant?

As the title asks, will IE8 & HTML5 make Really Simple History (and other Ajax history managers) irrelevant? Not so much says Brian Dillard, project lead for the Really Simple History project. While additions to HTML 5 & IE8 will definitely make managing page history easier, Brian anticipates that libraries such as RSH will evolve [...]

Filament Group’s Accessible Extensions

Accessibility is on the minds of most of us and for some companies, it’s an absolute priority. The Filament Group is taking accessibility seriously has produced two jQuery extensions that take that into consideration.
Accessible Charts
There’s been quite a lot of effort of late to leverage HTML Canvas element for visualization of data but doing so [...]

Do you want your browser to Jabber away?

Yesterday Rey posted about an ExtJS based Jabber client.
I had just earlier posted about whether you would want Jabber to be built into the browser, and will repost below:

Aaron Boodman was probably right in thinking that me wanting OpenID in the browser makes more sense as a browser feature, or separate plugin. This is a [...]

iPhone Optimization Script

Bob Buffone has created a tool that can be used to output script and HTML to make your site more usable on an iPhone. He tells us about it here:

I bought an iPhone about six months ago; in that time I noticed that even though it had this part of the Web and that part [...]

JavaScript Has Fashion and Luck to Thank?

Because JavaScript is the language of the web browser, and because the web browser has become the dominant application delivery system, and because JavaScript isn't too bad, JavaScript has become the World's Most Popular Programming Language. Its popularity is growing. It is now being embedded in other applications and contexts. JavaScript has become important.

Douglas Crockford [...]

Ext-based Jabber Client

The Ext JS user community has been extremely active producing some very cool user extensions to the framework. A new project that recently showed up is a Jabber client that includes:

Full rostermanagment
Instant notifications
Desktop look and feel
Tabbed chats
Wysiwyg messages



You can test out the Jabber client here:
https://194.94.76.11/jame/
You can use your own jabber account or you can use [...]

Key events and Safari 3.1

There has been a change in Safari 3.1 for how keypress events are handled. John Resig interviewed Yehuda Katz to get the skinny and understand why this was done.
The key comment is:
Use keydown/keyup if you want to know the key that was pressed; keypress if you want to know what text was detected.

John: At first [...]

FaviconGrabber and Social Graph

Alistair Rutherford has written a nice looking Flex application that visualizes the Social Graph API:

Alistair told us about the application, and some of the fun features:

The initial version was a bit boring looking so I thought it would be nice to pull the ‘favicons’ for the sites returned in the results. I have detailed how [...]

Nitobi Survey Results on Ajax Development

Nitobi ran a survey on Ajax technologies, and you (Ajaxian community) helped out in giving them your feedback.
They just released the results which consists of 570 answers. You must always take results with a grain of salt, since there are quite a few more designers and developers than 570 our there, but it is always [...]

Google AJAX Translation API

The game above uses the new Google AJAX Translation API that allows you to do two things via a simple JavaScript API.
Translation
If you want to take a word in one language, and translate it to another, you simply call something like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


google.language.translate('Gato', 'es', 'en', function(result) {


  alert(result.translation);


});


 





Here are the languages we support.
What if you [...]

Yahoo! releases new performance best practices

Stoyan Stefanov has been working with the Yahoo! engineers to find more best practices, and presented on a new batch:





He covers the existing 14 rules, plus 20 new rules for faster web pages. We’ve categorized the optimizations into: server, content, cookie, JavaScript, CSS, images, and mobile.

Here are the new items, with details on them coming [...]

An Ajax Ascii Art Generator

Thomas Hansen of the Gaia Ajax Widgets project took a look a the Asciify project that we posted about recently, and thought that Ajax could do just as good a job!
So, he created an Ajax Ascii Art generator:

So when I saw this Ajaxian Article about an ASCII art generator in Flash I felt compelled to [...]

Roundup on Parallel Connections

Steve Souders has taken a step back, analyzed the blog content that came out of IE 8 supporting 6 connections per host, and has pulled together the facts to discuss:
HTTP/1.1 RFC
Section 8.1.4 of the HTTP/1.1 RFC says a “single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.” The key here [...]

Snake

Andreas Kalsch has created a simple version of Snake in JavaScript that eats your feeds instead of food.
The first time I ever played snake was on a BBC Micro. I was small.

ShiftEdit: Live blogging tool

Jonathan Keebler has updated ShiftEdit to be a nice little live blogging tool.
You can login via Facebook or Windows Live (what no OpenID? :) and then can start new live events. You can imagine going to a conference or a Steve-note and popping this bad boy up and typing away.

OpenID and OAuth in the browser?

Originally posted on my personal tech blog

When I was looking over Brad Neuberg’s Paper Airplane thought experiment I noticed the single sign on feature, where you login to the browser, and then you are done.
I realized that this is what I actually want. Having one signon via OpenID is really nice. It allows me to [...]

SMD: Pluggable Web Services

PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


{target:"/jsonrpc", // this defines the URL to connect for the services


 transport:"POST", // We will use POST as the transport


 envelope:"JSON-RPC-1.2", // We will use JSON-RPC


 SMDVersion:"2.0",


 services: {


   add : { // define a service to add two numbers


   parameters: [


     {name:"a",type:"number"}, // define the two parameters


     {name:"b",type:"number"}],


   returns:{"type":"number"}


 },


 foo : {   // nothing is required [...]

Why getBoundingClientRect is important

We posted about PPK's thoughts on CSSOM which included him dissing getBoundingClientRect() and getClientRects():

I feel this part of the specification is not yet ready. At the very least, the relation of TextRectangle boxes to actual elements should be defined in the case there's more than one TextRectangle box, because I don't understand what to expect [...]

Ajax on Embedded Devices such as the BarracudaDrive

There is something cool about being able to write an Ajax app on an embedable device.
The people behind BarracudaDrive have released a free version of the BarracudaDrive Ajax application server for the Linksys NSLU2 and the Unslung Linux firmware.
Developers can customize and write their own applications by using the integrated scripting language Lua [...]

Multiple File Uploads with Aptana Jaxer

Dealing with file uploads can be a test of a Web framework. I personally long for the input type="file" to be improved with items such as multiple="true" for multiselection, let alone showing the status of the upload (20% complete).
The Jaxer folks have posted on Easy File Uploading using Aptana Jaxer which shows how you can [...]

Google Visualization joins the Ajax APIs

Yoah Bar-David & Itai Raz of Google have introduces the latest Ajax API: Google Visualization API, a new API designed for visualizing structured data.
There is a large visualization gallery that can show you some of the visualizations that you can use.
You tie into the API as you do with other Google Ajax APIs:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


google.load("visualization", "1");


 


var [...]

CiUI: CNET iPhone UI

Vladimir Olexa of CNET has released CiUI a iUI inspired iPhone JavaScript libary that mimics the iPhone UI behavior.
It's already being used on CNET¹s iPhone page (http://iphone.cnet.com). It's been greatly inspired by iUI with a few key differences:

AJAX calls are performed after a page slides
DOM doesn't get overloaded with "pages" as they load. Instead, [...]

Echo 3 releases client side component model

Echo has been known as a Java server side component framework, but with the release of Echo 3, they have added a way to build component applications using JavaScript:

Client-side Echo applications do not require an application server, and can also be run entirely offline.
With Echo3, the formerly server-side-only component framework has been recreated in client-side [...]

IE8 and Safari 3.1 compatibility updates

Our hero, PPK, has updated his compatibility tests to include IE 8b1 and Safari 3.1.
You can now check out the W3C DOM Compatibility - HTML table, and the W3C DOM Compatibility - Core tests.
Thanks for the reference PPK!

JavaScript Metaclass Programming

Neil Roberts is continuing a really nice set of blog posts with one that teaches us about JavaScript Metaclass Programming:

Metaclass programming is the programming that builds a class. Since most of the time a metaclass simply takes an already declared class and manipulates it, you can think of a metaclass as a template: a class [...]

jqunit: extending jquerys testrunner to all

Michael Grosser has created

Safari 3.1 Released

Safari 3.1 has been released, so fire up your software update now (or direct install).
The new release includes features (and many more):

JavaScript performance improvements
Standards: Adds support for CSS 3 web fonts
Standards: Adds support for CSS transforms and transitions
Standards: Adds support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements
Standards: Adds support for offline storage for Web [...]

pi.comet: simple comet library

Azer Koçulu thinks that you can create a comet application in 3 minutes with his new library pi.comet. It provides realtime data transfers between client and server.You can use pi.comet with any server side language.
The usage is very simple indeed:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var request = new pi.comet();


request.environment.setUrl("push.php");


request.event.push = function(RESPONSE){


          alert(RESPONSE);


};


request.send();


 





And the [...]

Subclassing and the prototype chain

Are you sure you should be subclassing that? is the question that Neil Roberts asks.
He goes on to solve a problem: you just want to change ONE property in this class, but you can’t change it on the actual class because that value would now be used across all instances of that class. So in [...]

ProtoSafe Eases Compatibility for Prototype

With so many new components being developed in a variety of different of JavaScript libraries, it’s a natural expectation that sooner or later, you’re going to want to mix and match these components within your application. Sometimes though, it’s not that easy due to architectural conflicts between different libraries. John David Dalton set out to [...]

cvi_text_lib: cross API text stroking

Christian Effenberger, or Mr. Canvas as we think of him, has come back from a data recovery nightmare with a new library, cvi_text_lib, that supports stroke text capability for Canvas & VML.
It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep the code clean and it works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, Safari [...]

Moo Snippely - Manage Your Code Snippets Locally

We all have bits of reusable code that we store in some fashion. These snippets prove to be invaluable at helping to not "reinvent the wheel" so storing them in a safe and convenient place is important.
The MooTools team wants to make it easy for you to store your snippets easily through the use [...]

Dojo Storage updated for 1.0

Brad Neuberg, a partner of crime on the Gears team, has released an update to Dojo Storage that has it cooking with gas on the new Dojo 1.x codebase:

Dojo Storage makes it possible to store large amounts of data (hundreds or megabytes of K) on the client-side, way beyond the 4K limit of cookies. Developers [...]

IE 8 Connetion Parallelism Issues

Now that we have our hands on IE 8 beta, we see developers testing the various features. Ryan Breen continues IE 8 tests on the new connection limits and parallelism:

A few weeks ago, I discussed IE8’s improved connection parallelism, specifically the increase from 2 concurrent connections per host to 6. One open question was the [...]

Progressive Enhancement with CSS support

Via John Resig we just got to learn about a clever technique applied by the Filament group in Boston called Progressive Enhancement with CSS support.
The study rightfully claims that object detection to determine whether a user agent is capable of supporting a certain interface is not enough. You also need to make sure that [...]

Lessons learned from improving Google Code web site performance

We went through Google Code and did a lot of work to get it running faster.
The team used a lot of the principles from Steve Sounders book: High Performance Web Sites and ended up with a nice gain:

According to our latency measurement stats, the user-perceived latency on Google Code dropped quite a bit, anywhere between [...]

Asciify: ASCII art library

Asciify is a new library that draws ASCII art for you, so it had "Friday" written all over it:

There are trends on the web (as in real world) that last days or weeks and there are things that became a classic form of expression of the geek culture and are still interesting to explore after [...]

dojox.analytics for developers and more

Dustin Machi has written about his dojox.analytics package:

dojox.analytics is a small project, both in aspirations and in size. It has a simple goal of logging browser and application data to the server for review. This data can be used to monitor application performance, effectiveness, and quality, or it can be used for custom data collection [...]

ECMAScript 4 Progress Tracking

John Resig started a detailed spreadsheet to track the progress of ECMAScript 4 implementations. There is also a set of columns to track the thoughts of various companies (Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) on various parts and pieces of the spec, which is enlightening. You get to see a layer of transparency in the [...]

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

Stuart Parmenter has been blogging about his work on memory usage and various malloc() libraries and their tradeoffs.
In his latest, he talks about the memory usage in Firefox 3 today and the work that he has done:

Reduced Memory fragmentation: One of the things we did to help was to minimize the number of total allocations [...]

Getting some $ with Dojo

Neil Roberts has posted a great article on Creating Your Own $ with Dojo:

The bling, one of the best global variables in JavaScript. A tool which has come to mean, as a function, a way to locate a node or set of nodes. And, as a namespace, a simple way to access often-used functionality. "This [...]

W3C CSSOM View Module

PPK has blogged a critique of the new W3C CSSOM View Module. He is a fan:

W3C published the first working draft of the W3C CSSOM View specification (written by Anne van Kesteren), and I must say I'm very happy with it. Since I was testing stuff anyway I created a new compatibility table for most [...]

Secrets of JavaScript Libraries

Andrew Dupont, Thomas Fuchs, John Resig, Alex Russell, Sam Stephenson. These were the folks that gathered at SXSW to talk about the “Secrets of JavaScript Libraries” in a panel that was full to the brim (as was the browser wars one the day before).
The slides are now up, and the podcast is forthcoming:




The group covered:

JavaScript [...]

YTranscript: Using the brand new YouTube chromeless, scriptable player

We saw a very exciting YouTube launch for developers today. People have long wanted to customize the YouTube player, and now you have complete control with a chromeless player that has JavaScript access so you can start, stop, go to a timing, and much more.
I took this API and implemented a simple DSL that allows [...]

WiseMapping: More Ajax Mind Mapping

WiseMapping is the latest Ajax mind mapping tool developed by Paulo Veiga and three friends.
Wise Mapping is a free web mind mapping tool that leverages the power of Mind Maps mixing new technologies like vectorial languages (SVG and VML) and the power of the whole Web 2.0 concept. The tools uses SVG and VML [...]

RadRails 1.0 Released

Aptana took over the RadRails open source project a few months back, and now have fully integrated it with Aptana Studio with the RadRails 1.0 release.
RadRails 1.0 runs as a plug-in to Aptana Studio. So in addition to all the Ruby on Rails IDE goodies and the integrated Rails shell command-line console, developers get [...]

YTranscript: Using the brand new YouTube chromeless, scriptable player

We saw a very exciting YouTube launch for developers today. People have long wanted to customize the YouTube player, and now you have complete control with a chromeless player that has JavaScript access so you can start, stop, go to a timing, and much more.
I took this API and implemented a simple DSL that allows [...]

Clientside Mootools Library Update

Aaron Newton of CNet has posted an update for his Clientside Mootools library:

We’ve refactored nearly the entire library and in most cases the changes don’t affect the actual interface to the classes and methods, but not always. Like Mootools, you can download a compatibility layer which will preserve the old syntax if you have code [...]

Sitepoint releases HTML reference as a beta

While this is not strictly Ajax or JavaScript related, it is noteworthy to point out that Sitepoint just released a HTML reference that is quite handy to have around if you wonder if what you are building is really HTML or just tagsoup.
Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are [...]

Taffy DB Javascript Database

Working client-side with data can be challenging and projects have tried to address this in different fashions. Ian Smith, creator of Joe's Goals, has his own approach. He's created Taffy DB, a lightweight Javascript database
that allows you to insert, update, delete, order, loop, and query against a client-side collection of data. The great thing about [...]

Controller: Event Delegation Library

Brian Moschel has created a new event delegation library called Controller, that aims to help logically organize your event handlers.

Like other event delegation libraries, it lets you define event handlers that never have to be reattached, even if the HTML is modified.
Unlike other libraries, controllers group event handlers for a specific set of HTML [...]

ProtoFlow: Coverflow for Prototype

Obaid Ahmed has written a coverflow-like component on top of Prototype and Script.aculo.us called ProtoFlow.
It is simple to use:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


<div id="protoflow">


        <img src="imgs/DSCN0940_91360.jpg"/>


        <img src="imgs/stimme_von_oben_187192.jpg"/>


        <img src="imgs/Tropfen_1_Kopie_201721.jpg"/>


        <img src="imgs/farbraum_012_147508.jpg"/>


        <img src="imgs/IMG_4906_199357.jpg"/>


        <img src="imgs/Tropfen_1_Kopie_201721.jpg"/>


        <img [...]

Firefox 3 beta 4: postMessage and perf

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 4 which includes new standards support and performance:

Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the [...]

IE 8 and Performance

Steve Souders has posted on IE 8 and performance improvements.
One new nugget of information that I haven’t seen anywhere else is the fact that scripts are now loaded in parallel (and execution is still serial of course):

Increasing parallel downloads makes pages load faster. (For users with slower CPUs or Internet connections it could possibly be [...]

Mozilla Prism update makes it easy to create wrappers

Mozilla Prism has just released a new version that shows off Firefox integration:

Today we’re releasing a major update to Prism that includes new desktop integration capabilities and simpler installation. With this update, you can now get Prism simply by installing a small extension to Firefox 3. With the new Prism extension for Firefox 3, [...]

Internal IE-HTML DOM still isn’t XHTML compliant

Jon Davis was glad to see that XHTML compliance was on the list in IE 8, but was surprised to see the above. It turns out that he found:

XHTML compliance exists in parsing and rendering only. Microsoft is still using an internal IE-HTML DOM that is not XHTML-compliant, even in XHTML documents. All you have [...]

Appcelerator: RIA + SOA

Appcelerator is a fairly new open source toolkit on the block that is trying to be an Open Web RIA to compete with Flex and co. with high profile folks such as Marc Fleury as advisors.
Nolan Wright, CTO, has written a piece for syscon entitled The Next Web Development Episode Is RIA + SOA. In [...]

JavaScript WebDAV Client

Vladimir Lichman of IT Hit has released an Ajax library for managing WebDAV servers.
The library is compliant with WebDAV RFC 2518 and allows management of Class 1 and Class 2 complaint WebDAV servers. With IT Hit AJAX Library you can copy, move and delete items, read and set custom properties, lock items and discover locks. [...]

iPhone SDK for Web Developers

Man, I was wrong in my post on what about us? and the iPhone SDK. All I knew about was the VP of Phone Software saying “we have stuff coming”, but there is a lot more that that, it is just not mentioned in many places.
If you head over to the iPhone DevCenter (registration required) [...]

IE and WebKit Performance; Is WebKit the Ralph Nader of Browsers?

We have seen a barrage of performance and compliance information this week haven’t we. Wow. We got a little more yesterday too.
The WebKit team talked about the Acid 3 test and how they are up to 90/100:

Support for CSS3 Selectors
We added support for all of the remaining CSS3 selectors. These include selectors like nth-child, nth-of-type, [...]

How green is your Web site?

Steve Souders, the Web performance chap, has been inspired to calculate how green your website is based on the correlation between fast pages and energy:

Intrigued by an article on Radar about co2stats.com, I looked at my web performance best practices from the perspective of power consumption and CO2 emissions. YSlow grades web pages according to [...]

DWR 3.0 Features, Interview with Joe Walker

SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann has posted about the recent InfoQ interview of Joe Walker and the upcoming release of DWR 3.0. The newest features for DWR include:

Offline Support (Google Gears and/or Dojo Offline)
TIBCO General Interface integration
Aptana Jaxer integration
OpenAjax Hub, PubSub, Bayeux, etc.

Joe gave a nice example of how the offline functionality could work:
For example, [...]

iPhone SDK: Great if you like Cocoa, but what about us?

There has been a touch of news about the iPhone SDK from Apple. Most of the press believe that the iPhone SDK exceeds developer expectations.
As an iPhone user I am quite happy. I look forward to email / contact / calendar push. I think that the tool chain looked fantastic (debugger, simulator, IDE, GUI-builder) and [...]

To ExtPHP, or to PHP-Ext?

I got emails on the same day from two developers letting me know about ExtJS wrappers for PHP.
PHP-Ext
First, Sergei Walter Guerra told me about PHP-Ext "an open source widget library written for PHP 4 and 5 to empower the UI Layer."
The API looks like this:
PLAIN TEXT
PHP:


echo Ext::onReady(
        Javascript::stm(ExtQuickTips::init()),
        Javascript::assign("data",Javascript::valueToJavascript($myData)),
  [...]

Backbase tests browser JavaScript and Render performance including IE 8

Sjoerd Mulder of Backbase ran a couple of performance tests on a slew of browsers, including IE 8 beta. He tested both the JavaScript performance, and the rendering performance:

A lot of respect and thanks to all the browser teams pushing the boundary of performance. I think it's an awesome result that the current nightlies of [...]

Firecookie: Put you hand in the cookie jar with Firebug

Jan Odvárko "missed two movie nights" to create cookie support in Firebug. His Firebug plugin, Firecookie, gives you access to view, search, create, remove, and manage the permissions of a cookie, all from within a Firebug tab.
Firecookie creates a log entry every time when a cookie is created, changed, deleted or rejected (an option you [...]

IE 8 on Acid

The IE team posted that they were passing Acid2 a few months ago, yet people are seeing a broken face when they tested with IE 8 beta.
Phil Nachreiner of IE explained the situation:

Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test, some of you may be seeing results like the image above; we [...]

WebKit, GTK, and Qt

Ryan Paul has written about creating rich Internet applications on Linux with WebKit:

The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications [...]

The FireEagle has landed - personal location information for your applications

Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and - even more importantly - developing [...]

Me.dium shows off new IE 8 features

Me.dium, the social browsing folks, have put together some examples using the new Activities and Web Slices features.
You can install their Activity if you have IE 8, or you can take a look below:

As part of Activities,
Me.dium now offers a powerful “Social Discovery” Activity from any page. Me.dium’s “Discover” Activity gives you recommendations, related to [...]

Dynamic Silverlight Launched: Ruby and more in the browser

John Lam has posted about a new release, DSL: Dynamic Silverlight. I can't believe that Microsoft is going to take the DSL TLA ;)

Our team is happy to announce Dynamic Silverlight (DSL), which integrates our DLR dynamic languages with Silverlight. It requires Silverlight 2, which includes the cross-platform CLR and a set of libraries for [...]

IE 8: Better Ajax, CSS, DOM, and new features

MIX has started, and we have the news we have been waiting for, for some time. What is IE 8 going to do?
Microsoft has put out an IE 8 Readiness Report that discusses everything:
Ajax Improvements
A white paper is here:

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back
and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used
navigating [...]

iWebMvc: DWR, Dojo, Spring and Hibernate/JPA

Joe Walker tipped me off to a preview of iWebMvc which is meta framework that ties together DWR, Dojo, Spring and Hibernate/JPA a la AppFuse or Grails.
It is created by Jose Noheda, a DWR commiter, and the project aims are:

Is based on Java
Although supporting Grooy / JRuby is a plus
Helps me to kick start [...]

CouchDB: Using E4X to get the XML back

Christopher Lenz has been spending time on the CouchDB project. He got lulled over when CouchDB went to JSON.
He talks about how "CouchDB is pretty well positioned for storing and querying XML data in addition to JSON" via the E4X support that it gets out of the box as it uses SpiderMonkey.
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


by_lang: function(doc) {
  [...]

CSSJanus: simple tool for RTL

Over on the Google Open Source blog I got to post about a new tool by Lindsey Simon that takes your CSS and spits out versions ready for the RTL world (or vice versa if you are a developer elsewhere that wants an English version….. which may be more common?).

CSSJanus is CSS parser utility [...]

Snook Live Chat Tomorrow (3/5/08)

Jonathan Snook will be conducting a live chat tomorrow (3/5/08) at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT) via UStream. Here are the details:

Location: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/snookca
Date/Time: 3/5/08 at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT)
Topic: Q&A relating to Jonathan’s development work with Adobe AIR, and questions regarding JavaScript, frameworks (PHP or JavaScript), or about freelancing.

This is definitely a good opportunity to pick [...]

Google Gears for Mobile Released

I have seen the huge batches of cell phones that companies keep around to test their applications on. Companies like UI Evolution have come along to try to help out the madness of getting something that works across more than a couple of them.
Not only do you have the problems of handsets, but you also [...]

Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Simple Save Message Using MooTools

It's been awhile since we've put up an Ajaxian Featured Tutorial and so we're going to get back into the swing of things with a nice, simple tutorial using MooTools.
Giving users feedback during a "save" process is a very good idea. It allows the user to feel a sense of confidence that the site is [...]

Dojo and Django templates on the server side with Jaxer

Yesterday we posted about Dojo and AIR and how the framework could be well suited for certain desktop applications.
Today we have Kriz Zyp talking about their Jaxer support and how you can use the Django template language, that Dojo recently added, to once again do its thing on the server side.
Kris tells us more:
PLAIN [...]

Acid 3 Ships; WebKit praised

Acid 3 has been released.
Jon Tan ran a few tests and posted the results. Hixie commented on his blog about the release, and praised WebKit on how they have been closing a large number of bugs:

I have to say straight up that I've been really impressed with the WebKit team. Even before the test was [...]

Silverlight Offline and AIR

A couple of articles from the press came out at the same time. Darryl Taft reported on his conversation with Kevin Lynch and Martin LaMonica published Microsoft to take Silverlight offline eventually.
The intersection is where Kevin answers about Silverlight going offline:

Well, what about an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it?
In order to do it [...]

Microsoft changes IE 8 defaults to be “standards mode”

You have to hand it to the IE team, they have listened to the huge amount of community feedback on the IE 8 user agent feature, and they have reversed their decision so by default IE 8 will run in standards compliant mode.

Why Change?
Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior [...]

Generics in JavaScript 2

Francis Cheng continues on his walk through of ECMAScript Edition 4 features, this time discussing type parameters (read: generics in Java).
We could end up with code like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


function reprimand(list:List.<+Employee>) { ... }
var writingTeam:List.<techwriter> = new List.</techwriter><techwriter>();
reprimand(writingTeam); // no error if ECMAScript adopts this style of variance annotation
 


I have to admit to having a few [...]

Dojo on AIR shows detail on AIR itself

At first when you hear "FooAjaxLibrary now supports AIR" you think "er, OK, AIR has WebKit so it supports them all doesn't it?". SitePen added support for AIR in Dojo and gave us detailed information about the changes.
The value of this document is that it gives hints to us Ajax folk as we develop applications [...]

Playing with language: Inlined fromMaybe

Oliver Steele continues to spend time thinking about languages in his recent post on More Monads on the Cheap: Inlined fromMaybe.
He details the pain of dealing with nulls and various checks:

This article is about how to deal with null values. It follows up on this one. It’s intended for code stylists: people who care a [...]

Json.NET 2.0

James Newton-King has quickly released a new version of Json.NET that has a new easier syntax for querying and and creating JSON.
Creating JSON
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


JObject o = JObject.FromObject(new
{
  channel = new
  {
    title = "James Newton-King",
    link = "http://james.newtonking.com",
    description = "James Newton-King's blog.",
    item =
        from p [...]

Firefox 3 Performance Numbers

Moving on from the "let me use that API" conversation and only some real stuff, urandom (thanks for the comment) let us know about the Cybernet News article on Firefox 3 performance.
They are reporting that Firefox 3 is now faster than Safari 3, and is close to WebKit nightly in certain benchmarks. I can just [...]

Snoto Photo: Snook, Flickr and AIR

After recently installing Snitter, I have to say I’ve become a bit of a fanboy of Jonathan Snook. The guy just produces some good stuff. So when I saw that he announced a new AIR application, I had to get it installed and checked out.
While Snoto (ya know, Snook, Snitter, Snoto) isn’t as polished as [...]

Pownce API v2.0 Released

The Pownce team has been working hard to get their API up to speed and have gotten the API to a point where some cool applications can be built from it. Yesterday, they announced v2.0 of the Pownce API:
We’re sorry it took so long for us to release a complete API. We’ve taken great [...]

xssinterface: cross domain access using postMessage and more

Malte Ubl has put together a library called xssinterface (somewhat scary name) that uses postMessage when available, and tries work-arounds when not, to give you cross domain JavaScript access.
How it works

For Browsers that support it, we use the postMessage() interface.
For all other browsers, we use the following mechanism:
All sites that participate in the cross domain [...]

Firefox 3 Mac performance gains due to undocumented APIs

Vladimir Vukićević has posted on the performance improvements of Firefox 3 on the Mac, and how one hack, albeit "dangerous" has helped ton. Vladamir says:

While figuring all this out, I noticed that Safari/WebKit didn't seem to be affected by this framerate cap -- the fps meter when Safari was running the same benchmark happily [...]

Windows Live Teasers before Mix

We are waiting for the big news at MIX, mainly revolving around IE 8. We have heard some reports from people who have IE 8 beta that the bugger is a bit of a disappointment, and that it hasn't moved on too much from IE 7, but lets wait and see before passing judgement.
Today though, [...]

Components of Browser Performance

If you could increase the performance of the JavaScript engine that would be great, but it is only one cog in the machine that needs to improve. We have long seen issues to to DOM bottlenecks and the like, and John Resig has gone through and diagramed the pieces (above) and wrote:

What's interesting about all [...]

pQuery where p = Perl

We have talked about a pQuery before, which was a PHP port of jQuery. Now we have a new pQuery for the Perl community:

pQuery is a pragmatic attempt to port the jQuery JavaScript framework to Perl. It is pragmatic in the sense that it switches certain JavaScript idioms for Perl ones, in order to make [...]

WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio 3.1.1 Released

WaveMaker has just released a new version of its open source Visual Ajax Studio v3.1.1. It is similar to TIBCO GI, but built on top of Dojo with JavaScript output that is very terse and even looks like something you may have written (which is rare indeed for a tool).
Studio lets users create database- and [...]

1000 Scripts and Counting

We’ve posted about AjaxRain.com before, especially regarding the great job that they’re doing in aggregating JavaScript and Ajax-related extensions from all over the web.
Last night AjaxRain.com hit a big milestone by posting script number 1,000. The lucky script, inline content editor called jWYSIWYG, was developed by Juan M Martínez and is designed to allow editing [...]

Every keystroke is a prisoner - a neat commenting trick

My favourite kind of tutorial or trick are the ones that are very easy to do but make a lot of sense - you know the ones that make you slap your forehead and say "why didn't I do that before?".
Dirk Ginader blogged about a commenting trick (in German) that is one [...]

The Presentation Tier @ TSSJS

Justin Gehtland is the track host of The Presentation Tier track at TheServerSide Java Symposium.
In this podcast interview, Justin discusses all that has to happen on the server side in order to render Ajax and its related technologies on the client side, what the shift toward RESTful-style apps means for developers, why there’s [...]

gearsAJAXHelper: Using Gears as an optional speed boost

Ben Lisbakken, who sits 100 feet away from me, developed gearsAJAXHelper, a library that bridges the AJAX search and feed APIs with Gears, to get a speed improvement:

We decided it would be cool to write a small library to make it easy for you AJAX APIs developers to write quick-loading, always fresh searches/feeds. The gearsAJAXHelper [...]

Kevin Hakman joins Aptana

When we posted the last podcast on Aptana Jaxer, someone commented on the fact that Kevin Hakman was there, and "Doesn’t Kevin Hakman work for Tibco? What does he have to do with Aptana?".
Aptana has now come out with the news that they have hired Kevin:

We are excited to announce that Kevin Hakman has joined [...]

Adobe extending Flash platform: Run C, C++, Java and more

Paul Krill picked up on Kevin Lynch saying "It's basically a way to take other languages and make them run on top of Flash Player" as he answered a question from the audience at Engage the other night.

Expanding on the project, Ted Patrick, Adobe technical evangelist, said the technology would allow for cross-compiling existing code [...]

Rounded tabs with Dijit

Nikolai Onken has written a detailed post on rounded tabs and how to get them all nice and happy with Dijit.
Although the example is focused on Dijit and tweaking the tab template:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:


<div waiRole="presentation" dojoAttachEvent='onclick:onClick,onmouseenter:_onMouse,onmouseleave:_onMouse'>
<div waiRole="presentation" class='dijitTabInnerDiv' dojoAttachPoint='innerDiv'>
<div waiRole="presentation" class='dijitTabContent' dojoAttachPoint='tabContent'>
            <span dojoAttachPoint='containerNode,focusNode'>${!label}</span>
            <span dojoAttachPoint='closeButtonNode' [...]

Include: Pack your JavaScript with ease

Brian Moschel just told us about Include:
It determines which files to compress at runtime and automatically compresses them into one script using Dean Edwards' Packer.
You can include any JavaScript from any other JavaScript with a relative path:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


include('myscript.js');
 


Then turn on compression like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


include.setup({env: 'compress'});
include('javascripts/prototype', 'javascripts/myapplication');
 


When you reload the page, a window will open [...]

ECMAScript 4 Milestone 2 Released

ECMAScript 4 M2 has been released and Francis Cheng has posted about the new version. M2 fully implements:

classes and interfaces

namespaces

pragmas

let, const, let-const

iterators

enumerability control

type expressions / definitions / annotations

runtime type checks (”standard mode”)

nullability

destructuring assignment

slice syntax
[...]

JavaScript Functional Pattern Matching

Adrien Friggeri has been playing with pattern matching in JavaScript a la functional programming.
Take a look at the examples such as writing a factorial via matching:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


function fact (n) {
  return m.match(n,
  [
    [    0  , function ( ) { return 1                    }],
  [...]

WaSP IE8 Round Table Discussion

The Microsoft proposal for browser version targeting in Internet Explorer 8 to default to IE7 behavior for all current DOCTYPEs has divided the web developer community. What implications would this have for web standards adoption? Would the web be in a state of damage if IE8 defaulted to standards mode? Some members of the Web [...]

Canvas Polar Clock

"agrath" has developed a very nice Canvas example using Prototype that makes use of a common Prototype-isms: Object.extend, Class.create, bind, enumerables, $w, $.
The Polar Clock is a different visualization of time and the example walks through all of the work required to implement it using Prototype 1.6.0.2 and Canvas, including the draw method:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:


draw:function(){
    [...]