JSON Diff Released

Tom Robinson has built a useful utility, JSON Diff, which gives you a graphical look at the difference.

Changed portions are displayed in yellow. Additions are displayed in green. Deletions are displayed in red.
The visualization is live itself, so you can move around the nodes using the triangles.

JavaScript Protocol Fuzzer

Gareth Heyes has written a JavaScript protocol fuzzer which has the goal of "producing every variation of javascript execution from links."
If you check out the demo you see all of the options available to fuzz:

Number of characters - This inserts between 1 and 10 characters in the chosen position
Character position - The string position of [...]

The fight for cross domain XMLHttpRequest

There is a thread going on secure cross domain requests. Microsoft came out with a paper saying that the W3C standard isn’t secure, and pushing the Microsoft XDR spec:

A few proposals and implementations exist like XDomainRequest in IE8, JSONRequest and the W3C’s Web Applications Working Group’s Cross Site XMLHttpRequest (CS-XHR) draft specification, which combines an [...]

dragtable: drag-and-drop reorderable columns for an HTML table

Dan Vanderkam has announced a new component dragtable:

Over the past several years, Stuart Langridge’s sorttable Javascript library has found widespread use. It’s easy to see why. Just add class=sortable to a table tag and its column headers automatically support click to sort. Pretty slick.
But sometimes sorting just isn’t enough. What if you want to focus [...]

Working with Web Services with ease; dojo.data and the WikipediaStore

Revin Guillen has posted about the Dojo dojo.data API and how you can layer access to Web services in a very elegant way.
His example shows building access to Wikipedia (demo):

Dojo recently received a new data store that demonstrates exactly what we want: dojox.data.WikipediaStore. It does just what it sounds like, turning Wikipedia into a simple [...]

CSS General Sibling Combinator in action

PLAIN TEXT
CSS:




 


#indirect-example1 h4 + p,


#indirect-example2 h4 ~ p {


    background-color: #CCC; color: #F00;


}


 





Eric Wendelin has taken a look at the general sibling combinator shown above as:
PLAIN TEXT
CSS:




 


h4 ~ p {}


 





This would affect each <p> element that is a sibling of a preceding <h4> element. This is different from the Adjacent Sibling Combinator (+) in [...]

Velocity Conference Videos and Slides

Steve Souders has a wrap up on the Velocity conference that he co-chaired. He links to his favourite content from the show, which contains a lot of Ajax related work. It was really good to hear snippets form the show such as Eric Lawrence of Microsoft saying "we hope to make Steve's book out of [...]

eval(’foo=a’, obj.fn); How you aren’t private in Firefox

Peter Michaux has found the magical eval(..., context) method available in the Firefox implementation. This means that you can't create truly private data:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


// Getting "private" variables


var obj = (function() {


  var a = 21;


  return {


    // public function must reference 'a'


    fn: function() {a;}


  };


})();


 


var foo;


eval('foo=a', obj.fn);


console.log(foo); // 21


 


// Setting "private" [...]

Browser Memory Footprints; Watching with real usage

Sam Allen has done something that I was actually going to try to do… use browsers for a period and try to measure what happens to performance and such over that time period. Real usage. Normal usage.
Sam created browser memory profiles from his work and then concluded:

These profiles are meant to provide a picture of [...]

YUI Autogrid: Correctly resize the grids

Our own Christian Heilmann has created a new JavaScript library Autogrid that marries YUI Grids, the base CSS library, to allow for smart resizing:

I love YUI Grids. I know my CSS and I know how to work around diff erent problems of browsers, but I am also very much bored about having to fix and [...]

Opera gets proactive and helps you fix your code

Opera is being very pro-active and have been hiring folk to give compliance feedback for sites that aren't working well on Opera.
Nik Cubrilovic covered this on the new TechCrunch IT blog:

Opera Software is building a team of “web evangelists” whose job it is to find sites that do not display correctly in Opera and are [...]

Book Excerpt: Practical Prototype and Script.aculo.us, Advanced Ajax Chapter 4

Andrew Dupont has written Practical Prototype and Script.aculo.us and has kindly given us a chapter excerpt to peruse.
You can download chapter 4 in PDF format here. The chapter covers "Ajax: Advanced Client/Server
Communication":

By now, you’re almost certainly familiar with Ajax as a buzzword. Technically, it’s an acronym—Asynchronous JavaScript and XML — and refers specifically to JavaScript’s [...]

Apple, SproutCore, and Coherent

I heard from a little birdy that Apple is going to be doing some interesting things with respect to JavaScript libraries.
Recently there has been a lot of buzz around SproutCore / Mobile Me, Objective-J / 280 Slides and remember the Coherent Cocoa Databinding framework?
I think that Apple took note of the recent buzz, and it [...]

flXHR: Flash based XHR from flensed

Kyle Simpson has announced a new family of opensource projects called flensed and the first project being flXHR which “utilizes javascript+flash to create a complete, literal drop-in replacement (by being API identical) for the native browser XHR (Ajax) communication mechanism. However, flXHR uses Flash Player’s security model to enable direct cross-domain communication, and also has [...]

Processing and Obsessing

Obsessing is a “very alpha” service that allows you to edit and build Processing.js applications on the fly. The editor is a tough flaky, but you can create and save your programs back to the cloud.

Badging Flickr with Dojo

Dylan Schiemann has a really nice case study post on implementing a Flickr badge with Dojo.
What is particularly interesting is how he starts with a simple version:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


<head>


...


<link rel="stylesheet" href="/dojo/dojox/image/resources/image.css" />


<style type="text/css">


        img.thing { width:50px; height:50px; }


</style>


...


</head>


<body>


...


<div dojoType="dojox.image.FlickrBadge" rows="8" cols="3" username="dylans"


        tags="dojotoolkit,italy"></div>


...


<script type="text/javascript" src="/dojo/dojo/dojo.js"


        [...]

SymbolicWeb: Ajax and Comet with Lisp

No matter how much Paul Graham talks about his Web success, we don't hear too often about Lisp-powered Web applications.
SymbolicWeb is offering up a new type of framework to help change that.

SymbolicWeb aims to create a GUI framework similar to GTK+ and QT for Common Lisp. It differs in that it uses the browser to [...]

KITE: Keynote’s Internet Test Environment

Keynote has announced KITE their “Internet Test Environment.”:

KITE is a product that is used by Keynote customers today. But at Velocity we will be announcing the KITE Early Adopter program in which Keynote is allowing anyone in the world to sign up (at http://kite.keynote.com) to work with us to put this FREE product to [...]

Rendering performance in Canvas compared to SVG and VML

Just after I posted about Ernest’s canvas experiment with photos he put something else up that tests the performance of rendering polygons with Canvas compared to other techniques.
The demo lets you run a live test, and view saved tests, comparing the Google Maps interface, which “currently draws polygons using VML for Internet Explorer, SVG for [...]

Clientperf: Simple Client-Side Rails Performance

Eric Falcao has released Clientperf, a simple client-side Rails performance plugin.
The tool came about as Eric is giving a talk on “14 rules of high-performance websites in the typical rails mongrel/nginx stack, the main idea being to focus on some of the important implementation details when it comes to client-side performance optimization.”

As I was planning, [...]

YSlow now has Firefox 3 support

Keeping in the performance vein, YSlow put a new version out in time for Firefox 3.
The new version includes:

Firefox 3 and Firebug 1.2 beta support
improved and simplified check for javascript minification
different coloring for inline vs. external CSS and JS (”All CSS” and “All JS” features)
clickable list of resources as a Table of Contents (”All CSS” [...]

Jiffy Firebug Plugin: Fine grained calculation of performance timings

Today is the kick off of the Velocity performance conference, and we are going to see a fair share of performance news over the next day or two.
To start out, Bill Scott (Rico/ex-Yahoo/now Netflix) has announced a new Firebug plugin, Jiffy that adds a new tab showing fine grained performance data. You want to know [...]

CNET Updates the Clientside MooTools Plugin Repository

The MooTools team recently announced v1.2 of their namesake JavaScript library and hot on the heels of this release is an update to the CNET Clientside MooTools plugin repository.
CNET has a very comprehensive set of controls and widgets that complement the MooTools library that provide such functionality as carousels, slideshows, date pickers and tabs. [...]

Photo Collages with Canvas

Ernest Delgado is having fun experimenting with canvas. He has posted on one of his tests which involved creating a photo-table-like system.
You can visit the demo that allows you to work with some photos and export them out. You can play with adding borders, show corners for rotation, all on the fly.
It is a rich [...]

Fluid.app gets another new build

Todd Ditchendorf keeps on pushing with Fluid, the Single Site Browser system that does so much more by giving you rich integration points. Ben and I demonstrated how we use Campfire as a Fluid application that ties us into Growl and more.
The latest version includes the following new features:

Single Window Browsing Mode (General Preferences). Actually [...]

Combobox Coolness by Giva Labs

The team at Giva Labs were looking for a method to show off a complex hierarchical tree of options within their software applications and while there are many options in terms of UI controls, they needed something that would be intuitive and offer both mouse and keyboard entry. The requirements were challenging:

Menus must resize and [...]

Endpoint Resolver: JavaScript Library to hunt for Location redirects

Re-posted from my personal blog
Sometimes you can get in the zone just enough to be productive on a plane. On my flight to Mexico City yesterday, I created Endpoint a project that contains a server proxy, JavaScript client, and Greasemonkey Script with a mission. The mission is to take a URL, work out if it [...]

Magic Toolbox: High-quality JavaScript Image Effects… for a Price

Jake Brumby of the European Ajax development shop Magic Toolbox recently pointed us to three of their creations: Magic Zoom, Magic Magnify, and Magic Thumb.

Each of these effects has a really nice implementation that works across a large number of browsers:

Jake shared some of their experiences building these effects with us:

Initially, our key challenge was [...]

Preloading Images with jQuery

Just the other day I was chatting with a colleague about how to go about pre-loading images before rendering a cool JavaScript-driven animation; Scott Jehl from the Filament Group wrote in to tell us about a jQuery plug-in that they use for just that purpose:

We recently put out a super handy jQuery plugin for pre-caching [...]

Ajax Experience 2008 Registration Open

We're pleased to announce that registration for The Ajax Experience is now open! The event is being held in Boston this year, from September 29 to October 1.
Mini-Events
In addition to the usual agenda full of interesting sessions and compelling content, we're pleased to announce that concurrent with the Ajax Experience, several of the most popular [...]

Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript

Sjoerd Visscher has written a library that lets you create algebraic data types in JavaScript for use in your functional programming world.
ADT.js is written in JavaScript 1.8 "which means that as of this writing it only runs in Firefox 3.0. I have chosen to keep it 1.8, because the code is a lot cleaner, thanks [...]

jsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree component

Looking for a Ivan Bozhanov walked us through his jQuery-based tree component recently. The state of trees out there is interesting. YUI! has a nice, stable tree control but Dojo's once feature-rich tree has been replaced with a fairly basic tree (i.e., doesn't appear to have in-line editing and drag-and-drop still seems flakey; Dojo guys, [...]

Ajax Avenue; No Exit

Thank god it is a Friday so I can post this bit of fun from New Zealand.
Stephen Colebourne found it and said:

This is a genuine street sign from Nelson, New Zealand. But perhaps its telling us that Ajax really is a dead end and we need something better?! Or that now we’ve started using Ajax [...]

Audible Ajax Episode 27: SproutCore with Charles Jolley

On the back of the iPhone 3G news at WWDC, the next biggest thing was the launch of Mobile Me, a compelling user experience to access Apple services using standard Open Web technology.
The application is written using the SproutCore framework, and I got to sit down with Charles Jolley, one of the founders.
We talked [...]

Browser News: IE, FF, Safari, and Opera

All eyes have been on the Firefox 3 launch, but there has been news across the board. PPK has been on the case and gives us this really nice writeup:

IE
No new version of IE has been released, but several important questions were answered in the past two weeks. IE8b2 is coming in August and a [...]

Frank Sinatra, Flash, and Ajax: Deckmyplace.com

Scott Boyce wrote in with an interesting story about deckmyplace.com.

The site was originally designed as a Flash site, but when the mandate came from the top to use HTML instead of Flash, he had to see just how much of the original comps he could implement. And it turns out, pretty much everything.
We asked Scott [...]

iWidgets Public Beta: Impressive Widget Builder

Joining with the Web 2.0 “go-meta” business model that’s so popular these days, iWidgets provides a service that lets you build widgets once and deploy them to various popular widget APIs and platforms.

At the heart of iWidgets is a “PowerPoint-like” widget builder that takes strong design cues from Yahoo! Pipes, but as Peter Yared (CEO [...]

New in standards: Acid4 and HTML 5 update

Some interesting news in the standards world. First, we have an updated HTML 5 working draft.
You can read the notes from what is updated or a visual diff which includes very low level details such as:

API for the canvas element has been cleaned up. Text support has been added.
globalStorage is now restricted to the same-origin [...]

Our Signal: Page Cloud Visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker news

Our Signal takes Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and Hacker News and creates a full page cloud visualization using jQuery.
The size of the box reflects the popularity, and the color lets you know the acceleration of that popularity. If the color is warm, it is on the rise, and vice versa for cool colors.
I like seeing alternative [...]

Hypno trip down the fractal rug

What a great title. It is an entry in the JavaScript 20 liners call out:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


//      chain( func )


//      make func chainable by making it return itsReturnValue¦¦this


function chain( func )


{


        return function()


        {


                return func.apply( this, arguments )¦¦this;


  [...]

Addressbook History goes into the cloud with App Engine

Re-posted from my personal blog
I recently built an example of the Form History Pattern using an Addressbook case study.
I found myself talking about App Engine on the On Air tour, so I decided to change the example to not store the data locally with Gears, but instead to save it away into the cloud via [...]

72photos: Proto/Scripty Photo Sharing Site

XMG Networks has thrown their hat into the on-line photo sharing ring with the launch of 72photos, an Ajax-heavy site which looks at least partially inspired by Apple's iPhoto '08-generated web galleries.

We asked 72photos to tell us a bit about how they went about building the site and how it compares to competitors like Flickr [...]

Dojo gets AIM API Support from AOL

James Burke of AOL announced that AOL has released Dojo modules which wrap AOL’s Web AIM API. This is a very big announcement as the Web AIM API lets developers incorporate core AIM functionality into any web page including the ability to sign on, send and receive IMs, and obtain a user’s Buddy List.
My [...]

Adobe AIR v1.1 Released, Enhanced Support for Internationalization

Adobe AIR, the SDK & runtime which has become the popular choice for building desktop-enabled web applications, has been updated with enhanced support for internationalization. With AIR v1.1, Adobe has bumped the number of supported languages to ten including Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Spanish & Brazilian Portuguese and included support for double-byte keyboard input.


Other notable enhancements [...]

Eclipse-like Dockable Frames using Javeline

I've never been a big fan of the Eclipse IDE's user interface, but personal biases aside, Ruben Daniels has come up with a pretty impressive feature in his Javeline framework: a dockable frames system for Ajax applications.

The screenshot doesn't do it justice; playing around with it reveals a nice interaction model that feels faithful to [...]

What’s the Value of a College Education for Ajax Developers?

The value of a college education in software engineering fields has always been up for debate. While the early days of our profession nearly required some form of academic exposure to so much as interact with a computer, the microcomputer revolution of course changed all that, and people have been debating how to gauge the [...]

Yet Another Web 2.0 Button Generator

The world may not have asked for another Web 2.0 button generator, but it just got one. “As Button Generator” (we’re assuming “As” is short for ActionScript) has a few features that sets it apart from the traditional fare:

It’s Flash-based, so you can interact live while you make changes, including drag-and-drop text placement, stripes (!), [...]

Adobe AIR v1.1 Released, Enhanced Support for Internalization

Adobe AIR, the SDK & runtime which has become the popular choice for building desktop-enabled web applications, has been updated with enhanced support for internalization. With AIR v1.1, Adobe has bumped the number of supported languages to ten including Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Spanish & Brazilian Portuguese and included support for double-byte keyboard input.


Other notable enhancements [...]

Eclipse-like Dockable Frames using Javaline

I've never been a big fan of the Eclipse IDE's user interface, but personal biases aside, Ruben Daniels has come up with a pretty impressive feature in his Javaline framework: a dockable frames system for Ajax applications.

The screenshot doesn't do it justice; playing around with it reveals a nice interaction model that feels faithful to [...]

SproutCore: Being talked of as a Flash killer? Really?

It may be going a little far to hype up Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore.
The post goes into a lot of history, including going back to NeXT days, to try to setup a case to match the title. It could all be a lot simpler though. They get to the meat:

The SproutCore [...]

modules.js: A New Stand-alone JavaScript Module Loader

Kris Kowal dropped us a line pointing us towards his year-long labor of love: modules.js, a stand-alone dynamic JavaScript module loader.

As the module-loading space is quite crowded at the moment (e.g., Google, Dojo, Yahoo, JSModule, etc.), we asked Kris to explain what makes modules.js different. He had some interesting things to say.
Existing Module Loaders Fall [...]

Obsurvey: Ajax-heavy Survey Engine

Allan Ebdrup wrote in to point us to Obsurvey.

Obsurvey features a highly dynamic interface for building custom surveys; you can choose from a bunch of different survey elements and customize them in place using a technology the Obsurvey team calls “Active Rich Document” (ARD). Nicely done!

Enhanced Class Inheritance with JavaScriptMVC

Brian Moschel from the JavaScriptMVC project wrote in to tell us about their recent efforts extending John Resig's earlier Simple Class Inheritance work.
In case you missed it, John's blog talked about his efforts to take the best of the many efforts to simulate classical inheritance in JavaScript and reduce them to a simple, easy-to-use piece [...]

Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript

I had to single this talk out. Steve Yegge is a living legend, and with his mammoth write up of his talk you can see it in text view, and you can also download all of the slides.
Steve does his thing, and goes in glorious directions, such as how we end up with a scriptable [...]

Mozilla Week: From Client (Firefox 3) to Server (Weave) to Mobile (Fennec)

It has been a busy week for Mozilla. We have seen news across the board of their technology.
First we have the news that Firefox 3 should be available to download on June 17th. They are having a download party to kick things off.
Stuart Parmenter had a proxy post that delves into the world of fonts [...]

Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites

Pingdom, the service that has gotten popular telling us when Twitter is down, has just released stats on which Javascript frameworks are the most common.

The websites were collected from the Alexa US Top 100 and the Webware Top 100 Web Apps. The frameworks we looked for were Prototype, JQuery, MooTools, Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo, ExtJS [...]

Pivot: Swing++ as New Java-based RIA Platform?

And now for something a little bit different on a Friday. Greg Brown from VMWare pointed us to the fruition of nearly a year’s worth of R&D: Pivot, a new GUI toolkit for Java.

While traditionally Java Applets and the Web have mixed together about as well as concrete and peanut butter, the upcoming revised Java [...]

PodiPodi: Enso / Quicksilver for the Web

carlo from the PodiPodi team pointed us to their work: an embeddable keyboard-driven interface inspired by Humanized Enso (which comes close to bringing Quicksilver to Windows).

Their playground shows the jQuery-powered tool in action. Dion and I are big fans of Quicksilver; I would love to see this catch on and be embedded all over the [...]

MooTools 1.2 Released

Many people wrote in to tell us about the recent MooTools 1.2 release and updated MooTools website. Coming nearly a year to the day after their last production release (1.11), Moo differentiates itself from other popular frameworks by cramming Prototype-inspired helpers and smooth effects into a small download. Weighing in at 90KB uncompressed, this bovine [...]

Gears 0.3 Released, and Google I/O videos on Ajax related content available

Some good stuff came out from my employer. First, we have the Gears 0.3 release which includes support for Firefox 3! I have been using it for awhile, and it has been great. The team wanted to get it out before the Firefox 3 launch (planned for June 17th). A plugin like Gears can get [...]

Validanguage 0.9: More form validation

Form validation may seem a little boring, but it is still one of the low hanging fruits for Ajax.
Validanguage is a simple new validation framework that you can access and configure through HTML (via comments rather than attributes) and a JSON API.
For example, if you place the following next to an input, it will flash [...]

TLS Report: Best and Worst Security Charts

The TLS Report is a new site that Benjamin Black has put together to watch over the security of major sites on the internet.
There have been services that watch the top sites for various statistics, but not security. The best and worst list has some surprises, namely:

Best: UBS.com, good to see a bank up there; [...]

ensure: on demand resources

Omar AL Zabir of Pageflakes.com has posted on ensure, his JavaScript library that provides a handy function ensure which allows you to load JavaScript, HTML, CSS on-demand and then execute your code.
Ensure ensures that relevant JavaScript and HTML snippets are already in the browser DOM before executing your code that uses them.
For example:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


ensure( [...]

Frizone: JavaScript dev, test, and deployment environment

John Leach has created a very cool new open source project called Frizione (Italian for Clutch).
Frizione is a “JavaScript development, testing and deployment environment. It comprises a library agnostic set of tools for any type of browser based JavaScript development, which coincidentally has Gears support.”
You run Frizione as a Web server and it gives you [...]

Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: A Double Dose of Dojo

The team at Dojo have been really working hard to improve their documentation and put more information in the hands of Dojo developers. Between DojoCampus.org and the SitePen blog, they've really come a long way to providing solid education material for the Dojo community.
Normally, the Ajaxian Featured Tutorial consists of one really good educational [...]

X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7

The IE team has created a new value for the X-UA-Compatible header in IE 8 IE=EmulateIE7.
We already had IE=7, which causes the page to be displayed in “IE7 Standards mode.” This forces both quirks and standards mode pages up that path, and people were asking for a solution that only pushes the non-quirks mode ones [...]

Leveraging Ext JS on the Server via Jaxer

When Aptana released Jaxer, it really excited the community because you could now leverage your client-side skills on the server end of things. Rich Waters of Ext JS talks about how to leverage Ext JS on the server via Jaxer. The code created by Rich creates a Ext JaxerStore which allows you to run queries [...]

Mascara: Putting lipstick on JavaScript?

Mascara is the latest in a “Write code in X and translate it to JavaScript” system to be launched.
Mascara calls out systems like GWT, Script#, and HotRuby and says…

Mascara has a different approach, because we actually like JavaScript. The core of JavaScript is well-designed, powerful and flexible, and in many ways a more modern design [...]

Aptana Cloud: A sneak peak

Dougal Matthews has been playing with Aptana Cloud in a beta form. He wrote up this piece that walks you through the functionality with screenshots:

After creating a project it then is automatically available in the cloud options.
When you click on the project under the cloud menu you are taken through a (very easy to use) [...]

Silverlight 2 beta 2: cross domain connections, more controls, and animation

Microsoft launched Silverlight 2 beta 2 last Friday (which seemed a bit strange….).
I saw this on the same day as some Adobe folks showed me an old thread that showed MLB.tv sneaking a context menu saying “About Silverlight” into the Flash version ;)
What is new in the latest beta? Danny Thorpe is looking forward to [...]

jQuery Selectors Refcard Now Available

The latest Refcard, jQuery Selectors written by authors Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz, has been released and is now available for download in PDF format (DZone registration required!)
jQuery selectors are one of the most important aspects of the jQuery library. These selectors use familiar CSS syntax to allow page authors to quickly and easily identify [...]

Require Javascript for Contributions?

On the Stack Overflow blog, Jeff Attwood asks Is it OK to require JavaScript to participate?

Note that by “participate” I mean “edit, answer or ask a question”. Of course passively reading a question and the associated answers will work fine without JavaScript enabled.
…
While we do believe in progressive enhancement, it’s possible that some of [...]

Is “finally” the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues?

Hedger Wang has been scanning a lot of Chinese blogs lately for solutions to IE6 and memory leak issues. One of the things he stumbled upon is a pretty nifty way of nulling the objects to stop memory leaks by using the try ... finally construct. So instead of this solution which leaks memory:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


function [...]

String Performance in IE: Array.join vs += continued

Tom Trenka has followed up his last post on String performance with a deep dive on IE that dispells the myth of Array.join.
Tom goes through tons of tests across versions of IE and using varying sizes of data.
In Conclusion

First things first—with the performance improvements with IE7, we no longer need to consider using an alternate [...]

Johnson: Wrapping JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace, and ARAX

John Resig pointed us to Johnson, a project that "wraps JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace."
It seems to give you a JavaScript interpreter that you can pass a context into to. The simple examples are:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:



require "johnson"
 
Johnson.evaluate("4 + 4") # => 8
Johnson.evaluate("4 + foo", :foo => 4) # => 8




John saw the following code that [...]

jQuery UI 1.5: Effects, API, and Themes

Paul Bakaus & the jQuery UI Team has released a major update jQuery UI 1.5.
There seem to be three major pieces to the news:
API Refactoring

What we came up with, was an API that removed 95% of our exposed methods, and kept only one single overloaded method per plugin. For example:

$(”div”).draggable() creates a draggable
$(”div”).draggable(”destroy”) destroys it
$(”div”).draggable(”method”) [...]

TileStack: HyperCard for the Web

LtU pointed me to TileStack, the latest attempt to resurrect HyperCard and bring it back to the Web (they are closely related of course).

Running online there are going to be limitations about which stacks can be ported, which may reduce the usefulness and impact of this project, but maybe a standalone version will come later.
The [...]

An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino

As I say in this podcast interview, I got an early look at 280 Slides the application that launched yesterday to much acclaim. People are calling it “Keynote on the Web”, which the team finds very humbling, and hope that one day they have all of the great features (and more!).
As you can hear [...]

A Technique For Lazy Script Loading

Bob Matsuoka has written a guest article on the topic of lazy script loading. Thanks so much Bob!
A recent article "Lazily load functionality via Unobtrusive Scripts" discussed how to lazily load Javascript script files by appending script elements to the HEAD tag.
While this works as expected, I've found that for best results, you should [...]

Google Analytics after onLoad and document.write for XHTML

I saw two articles that were both looking at similar issues.
Firstly, Pete Higgins has looked at the fact that Google Analytics is normally loaded via serial script tags which cause the rest of the application to wait and created a simple wrapper that changes things.
We have all seen the tell tale: "waiting for google-analytics.com ... [...]

NitobiBug: Cross browser debugging

Nitobi has released a cross browser debugging script, NitobiBug:

It's a browser-based JavaScript object logger and inspection tool - similar to Firebug. NitobiBug runs across different browsers (IE6+, Safari, Opera, Firefox) to provide a consistent and powerful tool for developing rich Ajax applications.

With it you can:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


// inspect an object


var myObject = {a:234523, something:'else', mylist:[32423,4556,'sdfs']}; nitobi.Debug.log(myObject); [...]

UberHour YouTube Game

Howard Rauscher created a fun YouTube API based application, UberHour.
It is an implementation of the drinking game power hour, where music videos change every minute for an hour.
Of course, we don't condone drinking at work on Fridays ;)

Canvas Quest: Rogue like RPG game

Andrew Wooldridge created CanvasQuest with the idea of creating a simple roguelike game. It has some interesting features like map loading, and uses graphics to render the text via sprites.

Javascript HTML Construction Benchmark

“innerHTML is 35 times faster than DOM.”
“DOM methods are just as fast!”
This is a constant argument, and statistics hardly help ;)
Laurens Holst of Backbase has taken a detailed look at the issue as he drew up his own benchmark.

People keep mentioning performance as an argument for using innerHTML, citing that article, so I thought I’d [...]

W3C Progress Events 1.0 Working Draft

The W3C Web API group has a new working draft, Progress Events 1.0.
This document describes event types that can be used for monitoring the progress of an operation. It is primarily intended for contexts such as data transfer operations specified by XMLHTTPRequest, or Media Access Events.
This API standardizes progress events that seem to popup in [...]

Implementing infinite scrolling with jQuery

Umut Muhaddisoglu has implemented the infinite scrolling pattern that Wikia Search has in place this week.
There have been other implementations, but this is a clean one using jQuery, and works by:

When user scrolls down and hits the bottom a function is called
This function gets the last DIV ID of the datagrid
Send a query with this [...]

WiiExtJS: Building Ajax apps that run on the Wii Opera browser

Shea Frederick has posted on building Wii-friendly web pages using the ExtJS library.
Shea focuses on the various issues that come up when building something for the Wii resolution, screen size, input types, and more.
For example, check out the layout:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


Ext.ns('Ext.ux.layout');


Ext.ux.layout.wii = Ext.extend(Ext.layout.FitLayout, {


    setItemSize : function(item, size){


        var viewSize = Ext.getBody().getViewSize();


  [...]

Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime

Nexaweb has released a new product that build on Dojo, dojo.E:

dojo.E provides developers with the ability to use an XML based markup language to add in their Ajax behaviors. Markup whether — XML, HTML or CSS — simplifies development by allow developers to convey in simple text format what they would otherwise need to convey [...]

SquirrelFish: Technical excitement

Watching people discuss SquirrelFish has been a real pleasure. The WebKit team set the tone with their initial technical detail. Instead of a post saying "We have a fast JSVM now. woohoo!", they told us why it is faster, and what they can work on from here.
The community is continuing the conversation. David Mandelin of [...]

IE 8 beta 2 coming in August

Bill Gates gave his last talk, appropriately, to developers at TechEd. No matter what you think of the guy, he is an icon that helped create the software industry. Without him and Steve Jobs, who do we have? :)
In his speach he talked about Internet Explorer, and how IE 8 will have an update in [...]

Mozilla Experiments with Applying SVG Effects to HTML

It seems so obvious once you think about it, but Rob O'Callahan from Mozilla took us by surprise in his blog post demonstrating his experimental branch of Gecko that allows you to apply SVG effects to HTML.

The code for applying the effects above follows:
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XML:




 


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"


      xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">


<body style="background:#ccc; font-size:30px;">


  <style>


    p { [...]

OpenAjax Alliance white papers on Mobile Ajax and recent browser advances

The OpenAjax Alliance has recently published two new white papers, one on Mobile Ajax and one on recent browser advances.
The first white paper, Introduction to Mobile Ajax for Developers, provides an overview of Ajax application development for mobile devices. The white paper was the collaborative effort among several leading companies in the mobile industry within [...]

jQuery Release 1.2.6: Performance Improvements and Dimensions Plugin Added to Core

A new release of jQuery is out — 1.2.6, skipping directly from 1.2.3. Most noteworthy are the performance improvements (you can check out the detailed performance data via this Google Spreadsheet). The headlines on improvements:

Event handling: 103%
CSS selectors: 13%
.offset: 21%
.css: 25%

Lots of other fixes, but the most important, IMHO, is the inclusion of Brandon Aaron’s [...]

Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Coda Slider Effect

The effect of “sliding panels” has become extremely popular for categorizing & displaying large amounts of data on a single page. One of the most notable implementations of this effect was done by Panic to display all of the features and benefits of their Coda web development IDE. Since then, many implementations of this effect [...]

SquirrelFish: Details on the new

We posted about the new WebKit JavaScript engine SquirrelFish, and now we have an official announcement that goes into fantastic detail on the beast:
What is SquirrelFish

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in [...]

crossdomain.xml, Java, and JNLP

Joshua Marinacci has detailed how Java SE 6 update 10 supports the same crossdomain.xml that Flash supports, and how you can marry it with JNLP to allow you to do Applet mashups without permission dialogs.

The applet security model, known as the sandbox, only lets applets connect to the webserver they were loaded from. They cannot [...]

Dojo Firebug Lite: Beyond console.log

Mike Wilcox has posted on Firebug Lite for Dojo and shows how he has taken it beyond console.log().
I was most excited about the DOM inspector:

Yes, I did say that a DOM inspector would imitate existing tools. However, I implemented this for a colleague who was struggling with a particularly nasty IE 6.0 bug one day [...]

Using CSS transforms to Build a Coverflow Effect

Webkit’s new CSS transforms are hot and developers are really starting to take notice. The ability to rotate and scale DOM elements via CSS has gotten people thinking about new possibilities. LifeRay’s Paul Bakaus has been experimenting with the new feature and was able to create a cool iTunes-like coverflow effect that actually flows and [...]

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0

The folks at Y!DN have released Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0, which contains a full set of stencils that cover Web components in various states including:

Ad Units
Calendars
Carousels
Charts and Tables
UI Controls
Form Elements
Grids
Menus and Buttons
Mobile - General
Mobile - iPhone
Navigation and Pagination
OS Elements
Placeholder Text
Screen Resolutions
Tabs
Windows and Containers

Whip out Omnigraffle or your tool of choice and get going :)
You [...]

Gaia Widgets 3.0 “Glory”

Thomas Hansen has released Gaia Glory the latest version of the toolkit library.
There are a ton of samples, and Thomas highlights the following:

TreeView
GridView
Portal Example
Dynamic Image
Controls Madness
Complex Controls Mixed

One big feature is the new skinning:

We are for this release MIT licensing our skins. Not only is the skin files MIT licensed, but our entire DOM [...]

Flipping out over Safari

Thomas Fuchs is having some fun at RailsConf, and sent out a fun use of the new WebKit transformations using the medium of the bookmarklet:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


javascript:document.body.style['-webkit-transform']='rotate(180deg)';


 


javascript:document.body.style['-webkit-transform']='rotate('+prompt('degrees',180)+'deg)';


 






Use this bookmarklet (drag to bookmarks bar):
flip
or this one if you want a prompt:
flip2.

Acrobat.com: PDF and Flash sitting in a tree

Ever since Macromedia and Adobe merged, we have been waiting for a day where PDF and Flash played really nice together, and today is the day. Very symbolic for the folks from the companies before the merge.
As TechCrunch says:

At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one [...]

Call for Feedback on OpenAjax Conformance and OpenAjax Registry

Jon Ferraiolo of IBM and the OpenAjax Alliance wanted to share with the community news on a couple of initiatives:
The OpenAjax Alliance is requesting industry feedback on two companion initiatives, OpenAjax Conformance and the OpenAjax Registry, which have been under development for the past year.
The term OpenAjax Conformance is shorthand for the set of conformance [...]

Hacking BrowserPlus to work locally

One of the details of Yahoo! BrowserPlus that people picked up on was the fact that it only runs against Yahoo! properties.
However, some folks have hacked that restriction so they can play with it locally, and assume that Yahoo! wouldn't like this.
Skylar Woodward of Yahoo! has posted that this isn't the case at all:

BrowserPlus was [...]

Remove Nested Patterns with One Line of JavaScript

Steven Levithan has been flagrant by creating a simple way to remove nested patterns with a while loop and a replace:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


var str = "abc&lt;1&lt;2<>3>4>def";


 


while (str != (str = str.replace(/<[^<>]*>/g, "")));


 


// str -> "abcdef"


 






Notice that the regex in this one-liner doesn't try to deal with nested patterns at all. The while loop's condition replaces instances [...]

SocialHistory.js: More Spyjax

Aza Raskin wrote about SocialHistory.js, a small library he wrote that detects which social networks that you use, and using that data to show the user only those sites as areas to work with. E.g. if you use Digg, show "digg this" etc.
He uses the technique that Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen came up with, [...]

Gears turns one; Old enough to power MySpace message search

Chris Prince posted about Gears turning one year old. It was launched at last years Google Developer Day, and here we are at Google I/O a short year later.
There was some fun news around Gears yesterday. Firstly, MySpace is using Gears to enable users to search their MySpace messages:

One feature that they were lacking was [...]

GWT 1.5 Release Candidate Announced

GWT 1.5 has a new release candidate. The 1.5 release is a big one, especially as it includes Java 5 language support!

Since the previous release of GWT, we’ve seen a lot of really great applications that demonstrate what is possible when you are able to focus on the user and stop worrying so much about [...]

On-line Auction Aggregator Innovates with Ajax

Dov Katz pointed us to Josh Bochner’s labor of love, http://www.jigadig.com/. It’s an Ajax-heavy jQuery-powered auction site aggregator. What really got our attention is the search results page, which among other things lets you view full item descriptions in-line without having to jump to a different page, infinitely scroll, and easily “pin” interesting items for [...]

Speed Up! with Wordpress and Gears

Reposted from my personal techno.blog

I was sitting on the tube a few months ago in London when I looked up to see Matt Mullenweg, Om Malik, and another nice chap whose name escapes me. A little random to bump into them in the middle of London, but we were all in town for the “Future [...]

Testing IE Versions Just Got a Little Easier

Testing your sites on different versions of Internet Explorer has always been notoriously difficult mainly due to the fact that Microsoft prevents you from running to different versions of the browser in Windows. Sure there have been solutions to get around this limitation but in my experience, they’ve always caused unexpected results and instability for [...]

YUI 2.5.2 Released, Big Focus on Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 Support

With the releases of FireFox 3 and Opera 9.5 right around the corner, it’s great to see the Yahoo UI team being extremely proactive in ensuring strong compatibility with the browsers in their newest release, YUI 2.5.2. Announced yesterday, YUI v2.5.2 fixes a number of bugs but focuses heavily on support for the [...]

Addressbook: An example of the Form History Pattern

One of the examples that Ben and I give in our State of Ajax talk at Google I/O today revolves around form history.
We were thinking about the case for Undo on the Web that Aza Raskin is proposing and it got us thinking about the usage patterns of form data.
An example that got me was [...]

Yahoo! BrowserPlus: Sneak Peak

Yahoo! has released a sneak peak into Yahoo! BrowserPlus which came out today as

A platform for extending the Web: an end-user installs it and a developer uses its features through a small JavaScript library. Some of the features that exist in the platform today include:

Drag-and-drop from the desktop
Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation & filters)
Desktop notifications


You [...]

HTML5 Video tag implemented in Flash

Mike Chambers has create a nice proof of concept that implements the HTML 5 tag using JavaScript and Flash:

asically, this parses out VIDEO element / tag and its attributes, and replaces it with the appropriate OBJECT or EMBED element to display a Flash video player that loads the specified video. It has support for playing [...]

SquirrelFish: WebKit has a new, fast, JavaScript engine

SquirrelFish seems to be the code name for a new JavaScript engine for WebKit.
You can see performance benchmarks that show a significant increase across the board of tests.
On average the tests show a 4 times improvement (compared to Safari 3.1), with spikes of 12.6x improvements on some access tests, and with the lowest grade of [...]

Going Fast on the Mobile Web Presentation

Nat Torkington pointed me to the presentation that Jason Grigsby of cloudfour gave on Going Fast on the Mobile Web.
It gets going by trying to show you the magnitude of mobile (3.3 billion in perspective), tells us that mobile has cried wolf for 15 years, but the time has come.
Finally, they go into detail on [...]

Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure

I just got to announce the Google AJAX Libraries API which exists to make Ajax applications that use popular frameworks such as Prototype, Script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo, and MooTools faster and easier for developers.
Whenever I wrote an application that uses one of these frameworks, I would picture a user accessing my application, having 33 copies of [...]

SoundManager 2 Updates: Speed and Demos

Scott Schiller has updated one of our favourite libraries, SoundManager. Being able to simply play some audio from your Ajax applications can be great, as long as you don’t use it gratuitously…. although we tend to do that a little in some of our demos :) We used SoundManager in our Wii Darts application.
The [...]

Scrolling Tab View for YUI

Reid Burke has started a project called yodeler which sets out to create a new set of extensions for YUI. His most recent extension is a tab view which allows the content of each tab to scroll horizontally or vertically:
My first offering is an extension of YAHOO.widget.TabView that uses a scroll animation to transition between [...]

dojo.workers: a showcase

Pete Higgins of Dojo has created a nice example, dojo.workers, that puts together coverflow with Dijit and some dojo.query animations.
He even takes out his frustrations with IE 6 as he creates a branch that looks like this ;)
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var newp = function(){


 // IE6 branch of this demo


 window.location.href = "http://" +


  (confirm("Is it 2008?") ?


   "webkit.org" [...]

HTML 5 and a different kind of ruby support

Anne van Kesteren gave an XTech presentation on HTML 5 and boiled it down to this:

The Web’s language is HTML
The Web’s application language is HTML too
HTML is pretty broken
HTML5 to the rescue
Defines processing for all of HTML
Is for Web applications and documents
Is defined in as an abstract language
Can be written in both HTML (HTML5) and [...]

Declarative Syntax for Widgets

Jeff Watkins is updating his MVC library, Coherent, and is wondering if he should add declarative syntax for child widgets. Currently, you have to write a lot of init() setup code, but instead he would like to do something like:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


sample.MyWidget= Class.create(coherent.Widget, {


 


    init: function()


    {},


 


    title: TextWidget('div.header em', {


      [...]

UFrame: div meets iframe

Omar AL Zabir has posted about a new library called UFrame:

UFrame combines the goodness of UpdatePanel and iframe in a cross browser and cross platform solution. It allows a div to behave like an IFRAME loading content from any page either static or dynamic. It can load pages having both inline and external Javascript and [...]

W3C CSS Namespaces; Now a Candidate Recommendation

The CSS Namespace Module has now been bumped up to a "W3C Candidate Recommendation", thanks to the work of Elika J. Etemad and Anne van Kesteren (who built on the earlier work of Peter Linss and Chris Lilley).
The module is simple, but will be a very welcome addition:

This CSS Namespaces module defines the syntax for [...]

GUIMark: Another Web application benchmark

Sean Christmann has introduced GUIMark, a benchmark for HTML, Flex, Silverlight, Swing, and anything else you port it too.
Sean saw Bubblemark and thought that there was room for a different type of benchmark:

GUIMark takes a different approach by trying to benchmark the types of UI elements common in our Web 2.0 world. This includes things [...]

JavaScript Super Mario Kart

Jacob Seidelin keeps on going, and has created a Super Mario Kart prototype:

It uses the canvas element to do most of the rendering and should work in both FF2, FF3, Opera(9.27 and beta) and Safari 3.1.1. There are a few glitches in Safari in the kart sprites, but other than that it should be playable. [...]

Soft-hyphens and inline-block; Subtleties in Firefox 3 RC 1

Kevin Yank has zoomed into the features in the new Firefox 3 RC 1, and explained two subtle ones that can help us as Web developers:
Soft Hyphens

Tucked away in the list of CSS improvements in Firefox 3 is this innocuous-looking feature: “HTML soft hyphens (­) are now supported.”
Soft hyphens are one of those obscure gems [...]

PersistJS: Cross Browser Client-Side Persistent Storage

Paul Duncan announced today the release of PersistJS, a client-side JavaScript persistent storage library.
Currently the only reliable cross-platform and cross-browser mechanism for storing data on the client side are cookies. Unfortunately, using cookies to store persistent data has several problems:
* Size: Cookies are limited to about 4 kilobytes in size.
[...]

Firebug 1.2 beta for Firefox 3 RC 1

Firebug 1.2 beta is in the wild. The latest beta of the bug your FF3RC will love features:
Enablement UI

Disable always: when the Firebug UI is not active on any page, the debugger is disabled (minimal overhead)
Instant on: when the Firebug UI is active, HTML, CSS, DOM views activate (minimal overhead)
Script panel user-activation: initially disabled or [...]

crossdomain.xml misconfigurations galore

Jeremiah Grossman took a fresh look at crossdomain.xml usage and decided to see which top domains had lenient policies in their files, which is now published and updated.
Why is this important?

This week I took a renewed interest in crossdomain.xml. For those unfamiliar this is Flash’s opt-in policy file that extends the same-origin policy to include [...]