IE 8 and the User Features

The first main play for IE 8 was to get developers on board, and start a conversation with us on what they are fixing, and where they are going.
There were a couple of user features such as Activities and Web Slices, but you could tell they hadn't finished there.
In their latest blog post they talk [...]

JSON Pickle: Serialize your complex Python objects to JSON

John Paulett wanted to be able to define complex Python model objects, then seamlessly pass them into CouchDB and to client-side Javascript.
To make this happen for objects that are beyond primitive sets he created JSON Pickle which has been used on the Universal Feed Parser, and lets you do the following:
PLAIN TEXT
PYTHON:




 


>>> import jsonpickle


>>> from [...]

Adobe AMF Support in Zend Framework

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted on a proposal for AMF support in the Zend Framework, which is being lead by the AMFPHP project leader, Wade Arnold.

This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side.
We are excited about this proposal [...]

No Browser Left Behind… without Canvas

Vladimir Vuki?evi? normally hacks on Mozilla products, but spent a little time on an experiment with IE. An experiment that looks very exciting indeed.
I love canvas, and wish that it was ubiquitous. We have great wrappers out there such as dojo.gfx, but wouldn’t it be nice if canvas worked everywhere? (and the full API to [...]

Light-weight JSON Binding Framework

In my other life as a desktop application developer (which due to a mix of Fluid, AIR, Prism, canvas, SVG, and Flash is threatening to converge on my Ajax life) I've long been a fan of data-binding frameworks that make it easy to have a form automatically synchronize with backing data structures, saving you from [...]

onJSReady Prototype Plug-in

In a follow-up to our post a few days ago on parallelizing JavaScript loading and firing an event when loading is done, Stefan Hayden wrote a Prototype extension (based on onDOMReady) that makes it easy for you to execute your code when all JavaScript is loaded:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


Event.onJSReady(function () { dependent_on_external_js(); });


 

Inline Script Wrapper and Dependencies

Stuart Colville has found an issue where he needed to output some JavaScript in the middle of a page, before a library that depended on it was available:

The 6th Rule in Yahoo’s Performance Rules recommends placing script before the closing body tag to prevent blocking holding up the rendering of the page’s content. This works [...]

4D Web 2.0 Pack

4D is a commercial company that has a high level framework that sits on top of their RDBMS technology. They have a new version that allows you to access data in many new places: iPhone, Gears, HTML 5 APIs, AIR and Flex.
Check out the online demos such as a drag and drop shopping cart, or [...]

Book review: “JavaScript: The Good Parts” by Crockford

I heart David Flanagan. I’m making my way through “The Ruby Programming Language” this summer. Its exhaustiveness really satisfies. But a decade ago, my programming Bible was Flanagan’s “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”. As I transitioned from a career in content to a career in code, “the Rhino book” taught me everything I needed to know [...]

JSON-head, it is not about size - it is about usefulness

Simon Willison is lately having a lot of fun with App Engine and developing small RESTful helper apps for the masses out there. Following JSON Time, a small timezone lookup API over HTTP (showcased at BBC's Mashed earlier this year) he now released JSON head which is what it says on the tin: a HTTP [...]

Ajax-Alexa-Thumbnails: API to get site thumbnails

Have you ever wanted to be able to easily grab a thumbnail image that represents a website?
Eric Ferraiuolo has created Ajax-Alexa-Thumbnails on Google Code, a library that builds on YUI to do just that.
The project consists of a server-side component written in PHP which makes the cross-domain request to Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnail web service, [...]

PushUpTheWeb.com: Browser detection and Upgrading

Nick Stakenburg is beating the drum of getting users to upgrade their browsers, and has created PushUpTheWeb.com.

Pushup is an effort to push the web forward by helping users update their outdated browsers. Give your users a better web experience today by installing Pushup on your domain!

By putting the script up, users will have their browser [...]

ProtoChart: Using Canvas to give you good looking charts

ProtoChart is a new opensource library using Prototype and Canvas to create good looking charts.
Features

Line, bar, pie, curve, mix, and area charts available
Multiple data series on same graph
Legend support
Customizable grid, grid border, background
Customizable axis-tick values (both x and y)

Check out a live demo of ProtoChart at work.

Dojango: Two great tastes in one can!

Dojango, a template Django application that includes full Dojo support baked in, has been released by Tobias Klipstein, Nikolai Onken, and Wolfram Kriesing.

It provides capabilities to easily switch between several Dojo versions and sources (e.g. aol, google, local)
Delivers helping utilities, that makes the development of rich internet applications in combination with dojo more comfortable.
It makes [...]

What’s the Fastest Way to Code a Loop in JavaScript?

Gregory Reimer, frontend engineer for sun.com, has written a barrage of tests to answer the question What's the Fastest Way to Code a Loop in JavaScript? specifically for large data sets:

I built a loop benchmarking test suite for different ways of coding loops in JavaScript. There are a few of these out there already, but [...]

Greg Murray, Ryan Johnson join Aptana to work on Jaxer; ORM and MVC are starter projects

Paul Colton posted that Aptana has a couple of new recruits in Greg Murray and Ryan Johnson.
Greg Murray was the Ajax guy at Sun, created jMaki, and did a lot of work in organizations such as the Open Ajax Alliance. Ryan Johnson is the creator of the livepipe and object.event Ajax libraries. What are they [...]

Firebug Lite 1.2; Now with improved lite-ness

Steve Souders gave a talk at OSCON yesterday where he demonstrated the new Firebug Lite 1.2.

Today Firebug Lite 1.2 was released. This new version was built by Azer Koçulu, creator of pi.debugger. Azer joined the Firebug Working Group, morphed the GUI to look Firebug, and added it to the Firebug code base.
Firebug Lite is a [...]

HTML 5 Linking all around the horn

Eric Meyer has been working on an HTML 5 linking proposal and has put together a demonstration of his proposal.
His linking demo shows how you could put href="..." on paragraphs, table rows, cells, and many other places.
This demo is done with simple JavaScript for now, with the obvious hope that browsers natively support these features [...]

Intersections and SVG objects

Kevin Lindsey has a suite of tests that show various intersection routines for SVG objects:

Each link allows you to manipulate the shapes listed. All intersections between the two shapes are updated as you manipulate the shapes. Some intersections display additional information when the shapes do not intersect. As an example, the circle-circle intersection determines if [...]

An Adobe evangelist gives his opinion on Silverlight

I do NOT work for Adobe. I do NOT work for Microsoft. I do not work for Borland. I do not work for Oracle. I do not work for any competing manufacturer of any kind. I am Joe Developer. In the end, it’s folks like ME that will decide which technology survives and which dies [...]

Open Web Foundation: David Recordon at OSCON

David Recordon has just started his OSCON talk, embedded above, on supporting the Open Web.
He is announcing the Open Web Foundation, a new attempt to have a place for us to incubate, license, and build community around specifications, protocols, and more.
I posted about this on my blog as I am an initial member:

I am excited [...]

Getting around the blocking of script

Stoyan Stefanov has a post that discusses the issues with browsers blocking on script tags.
He discusses the general problem and how YUI has a helper for it by using onreadystatechange and onload:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var myHandler = {


    onSuccess: function(){


        alert(':))');


    },


    onFailure: function(){


        alert(':((');


    }


};


 


var urls [...]

Beyond REST: XMPP PubSub

Kellan from Flickr, and Evan from ENTP gave a talk at OSCON on building data services with XMPP which gave plenty of examples including notes on OAuth.
We have written about Jabber in JavaScript, and as XMPP continues to grow and grow on the Web, it is good to keep up with it.

Ext GWT Grid, Grid Plugins, and EditableGrid

Darrell Meyer has posted a preview of the Ext GWT Grid and more.


Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing.
Grid vs. Table
One if the biggest differences between [...]

Embedded OpenType and the W3C

PLAIN TEXT
CSS:




 


@font-face {


  font-family: Cambria;


  font-style: normal;


  font-weight: normal;


  src: url(CAMBRIA2.eot);


}


 





We discussed the new font-face / EOT work yesterday. Ben loves typography, hence him wanting to give Tahoma a rest.
Then we see Microsoft weighing in on the topic, and it made me ponder the politics going on.
Bill Hill has a new post on the IEBlog [...]

Combining JavaScript and CSS for Performance

Tenni Theurer of Yahoo! has a new performance post, this time focused on serving files faster by combining them:

One performance technique without having to simplify the page design is to combine multiple scripts into a single script, and similarly combine multiple stylesheets into a single stylesheet.
Combining multiple files reduces the extra bytes from HTTP headers [...]

window.name meet dojox.io.windowName

We have written about using window.name as a transport and Kris Zyp has just posted about how Dojo has created a new dojox.io.windowName module.

The window.name transport is a new technique for secure cross-domain browser based data transfer, and can be utilized for creating secure mashups with untrusted sources. window.name is implemented in Dojo in the [...]

Getting to know GWT JSNI; Including talking to GWT code from JavaScript

Bruce Johnson has written an expansive post on understanding the GWT JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI). It starts out with the piece that some people know about, namely inlining native JavaScript such as this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVA:




 


// Java method declaration...


native String flipName(String name) /*-{


  // ...implemented with JavaScript


  var re = /(\w+)\s(\w+)/;


  return name.replace(re, '$2, $1');


}-*/;


 





But what about [...]

Defining the Open Web

I heard that when asked who knew what the “Open Web” meant at a recent conference, hardly anyone put their hands up. Those that often think that they do understand it, understand it at a gut level.
Brad Neuberg has been thinking about this, and

Neat Firefox Video SVG Tricks

Chris Double recently announced that Firefox is edging closer to supporting the Video and Audio elements; the front-end code is checked into the trunk and the back-end video decoders are close behind.
In an interesting mash-up, Chris applied his Video patches to the Rob O’Callahan Firefox branch we discussed earlier to produce some wild real-time video [...]

The Fight for Fantastic Fonts (or, Let’s Give Tahoma a Rest)

What's the greater of these evils: contorting site designs around the standard Web-safe fonts, using images to render type, or relying on sIFR to render type with Flash?
Who knows, but man, it sure would be nice if we could reliably use any font we wanted in our web work. And, as it turns out, IE4+ [...]

Pondering Support of IE6

If there's a single experience that bonds all Web developers, it is the incomprehensible joy of wasting hours of our lives supporting IE6. The quasi-palindromic Dionysios Synodinos (alright, it's pretty far from reversible, but there's got to be a good anagram in there) over at InfoQ has put together a fun piece discussing wither IE6. [...]

WebMonkey’s Five Best Firebug Extensions

Adam DuVander over at WebMonkey has compiled a list of their five favorite Firebug extensions. The ever-popular YSlow tops the list, but to that they add:

Firecookie for easy access to cookie information
FirePHP to integrating server-provided PHP debugging information with the Firebug UI
Pixel Perfect for overlaying mock-ups on top of the real thing to ensure you've [...]

Increase DOM Node Insertion Performance

John Resig continues his streak of compelling blog entries with “DOM DocumentFragments” where he shows that:

A method that is largely ignored in modern web development can provide some serious (2-3x) performance improvements to your DOM manipulation.

The technique shown is compatible across a large swath of modern browsers, including our friend IE6.

iPhone Native Apps vs. iPhone Web Apps

John Allsop wrote a long piece over at Web Directions South with some thoughts on writing native iPhone apps versus web-based iPhone apps.
The obvious flaw in his piece is that he only looked at free iPhone applications and from that subset concluded that almost everything the native apps do could be done with web applications [...]

jQuery: Sparklines Plug-in

Edward Tufte has long had a following of fans in the field of information visualizations. Among his interesting taxonomy of visualization types is the “Sparkline“, which he describes as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”.
While Tufte originally suggested that computer displays are too low-resolution to effectively make use of Sparklines (vs. printed page), James Dempster pointed us [...]

Firebug to get a boost

Great news for all Web developers out there (that be you!). Firebug is going to get a shot in the arm. Joe Hewitt has had to slow down his work on the tool, and thus the Firebug Working Group was created, to try to make the tool continue to thrive.
The work has been mainly done [...]

Lightweight Grid Control for jQuery

Developers are always looking for a great grid control that is easy to use, customizable and, of course, feature-rich. Paulo Mariñas has created just that for jQuery developers. Flexigrid is an extremely flexible grid control with provides many of the features highly-desired by developers. These include:

Resizable columns
Resizable height and width
Sortable column headers
Cool theme
Can convert an [...]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle…. your code

With a young son, I often listen to the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” song by Jack Johnson for the Curious George movie. Edgar Hassler has taken that axiom and applied it to code.
Edgar goes into a lot of detail, including the following issue that he ran into:

The problem I kept having was that I needed to [...]

Semantic Constructors

PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


Class.create = (function(original) {


  var fn = function() {


    var result = original.apply(null, arguments);


    result.toString = function() { return result.prototype.initialize.toString() };


    return result;


  };


  fn.toString = function(){ return original.toString() };


  return fn;


})(Class.create);


 





This monkey patch by kangax allows you to get sense from inspecting a constructor setup via Prototype.
His code changes a [...]

Radiohead + Open Data = JavaScript + Canvas Visualizations of their work

I work on Google Code. Hearing that Radiohead was going to release data with progressive licensing and wanted to do so on Google Code was awesome.
Now we see how cool it is that the data is open. People like Jacob Seidelin are doing interesting things with it.
In this case, Jacob has created amazing visualizations of [...]

Defender of the Favicon

Mathieu Henri saw Scott Schiller’s generated favicons VU meter and wanted to “push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.”
Wow. He went and did it. The entire game runs in the favicon!

DEFENDER of the favicon was done in 3 nights, from [...]

A tutorial on Prototype, Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI

Jeffrey Barke has written up a tutorial detailing how to create a density map with Prototype, the Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI.
The heat map API looks cool indeed, and that piece of code looks simple:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


addHeatMap: function() {


var heatMap = new GEOHeatmap();


heatMap.Init(this.width, this.height);


heatMap.SetData(this.data);


var preUrl = heatMap.GetURL();


var heatmapOverlay = new HMGoogleOverlay(preUrl);


this.map.addOverlay(heatmapOverlay);


}


 

IEPNGFix 2: Now supports CSS background position and repeat

Ah the age old IEPNGFix solution to the problem that we had with IE 5.5 / 6.0 not supporting alpha transparency. The first IEPNGFix solved the problem:

This script adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now you can have full translucency and no more ugly grey borders! It requires only [...]

Building a better ActionScript

Colin Moock has been creating some buzz in the Flash community with his article on the charges against ActionScript 3.0:

The removal of on()/onClipEvent() from Flash CS3 makes creating simple interactivity hard.
Getting rid of loaded .swf files is hard.
Casting DisplayObject.parent makes controlling parent movie clips hard.
The removal of getURL() makes linking hard.
The removal of loadMovie() makes [...]

Dojo Grid Widget Updated. Data Integration and Editing Improvements.

Dojo developers will be pleased to read about the recent update to the Dojo grid control. Version 1.2 of the grid control focuses primarily on improving integration with Dojo data stores, improved grid layout handling and providing advanced in-place editing capabilities. The update was fairly extensive forcing the team to rethink the design of the [...]

Mozilla Labs is Ubiquitous

The Humanized folk who now work in Mozilla Labs have taken their Enso work and created Ubiquity, a Firefox plugin that implements the Graphical Keyboard User Interface:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it’s difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is [...]

IE8 HTML 5 Ajax Page Navigations

Sharath Udupa, an IE developer at Microsoft has posted on the IE 8 page navigations feature:

In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without [...]

Live Scrolling via Ext’s LiveDataPanel Widget

Many developers really like the live scrolling functionality popularized by DZone. As you scroll down the page, a XHR call is made which pulls back data and instantly refreshes and allows you to continue to scroll down almost endlessly. Aaron Conran has built a widget for the Ext JS library which provides this functionality in [...]

PubTools Search: Fast client-side searching with Gears

Brad Neuberg has built a very easy to use client side search tool called PubTools Search using Gears. The project is open source and provides a great avenue to share knowledge on Gears itself.
To accompany the code, Brad wrote a detailed article:

Did you know that you can use Gearsto do fast, client-side searching of data, [...]

Paint Servers: SVG and Canvas

Robert O'Callahan and Dave Hyatt have been chatting about paint servers as Robert creates SVG ones and then arbitary elements.
This continues the meme of taking common use cases and making them easy via CSS (e.g. reflections).
Here is the SVG version:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


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


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


<head>


<style>


h1 { background:url(#h); }


p { background:url(#p); }


span { background:url(#h); }


</style>


</head>


<body>


  <h1 style="width:95%;">Heading</h1>


  [...]

XBL 2: The component model is coming to WebKit and Gecko

Wouldn't it be nice if we actually had a decent component model? Instead of making JavaScript frameworks have to mess around and try to create one on top of the crud they have to deal with?
This is what XBL 2.0 is all about. I talked about XBL in one of my Web Archeology posts, and [...]

Free copies available of the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide

If you have an interest in Adobe AIR, Mike Chambers has 100 free copies of the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide, and one of them could have your name on it.
All you have to do is email him with your name, shipping address, and phone number if you are outside of the US. The [...]

iPhone Web: Multitouch JavaScript “Virtual Light Table”

The video above is Tom Robinson, one of the 280 North fellas who is smart enough to port Cocoa to the Web, showing us his multitouch "virtual light table" using the JavaScript APIs nicely documented by SitePen, as well as Apple.
His ~100 lines of code uses the new CSS transforms handles all of the touch [...]

Domize: Visualize your domains

Anson Parker has created Domize another in the line of Ajax domain utilities. Here is what Anson had to say about it:

It is the fastest as-you-type
domain name look-up tool for web and iPhone users. Queries are
encrypted over SSL for security and privacy. Domize is really head and
shoulders above its peers in allowing you to quickly [...]

Verity Snob: How to be an instant Web me-2.0 developer

If you have time to step away from the iPhone, have a little giggle as "Verity Snob" has a piece on How to be an instant Web me-2.0 developer that includes the documented Web version numbers:

Web 1.0: Programming model equivalent to that of a slightly up-market 3270 terminal. Forms are filled in with the sequence: [...]

Interview with the Gears on Rails team

With my Google hat on, I got to interview Michael Marcus and Rui Ma, two recent graduates from a masters program at NYU. They joined me to discuss Gears on Rails, their open source framework that makes it easier than ever to take a Rails code-base offline.
They take the approach of giving you a high [...]

HTML 5 data- elements to store private values

John Resig goes into more detail on the HTML 5 data- elements that gives developers a valid place to store metadata:

This allows you to write valid HTML markup (passing an HTML 5 validator) while, simultaneously, embedding data within your page. A quick example:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


<li class="user" data-name="John Resig" data-city="Boston"


     data-lang="js" data-food="Bacon">


  <b>John says:</b> <span>Hello, how [...]

Creativescrape: Thomas and Amy team up again

Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy have teamed up again for a micro-app called Creativescrape "an inspration utility for those moments when you just seem to be braindead. It comes with a OS X screensaver for your enjoyment."
All via 188 lines of fun living on top of Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

iPhone Web Goodies: Drag and Drop with Touch, Resize and Rotate with Gestures

The video above shows a simple showcase application that Neil Roberts of SitePen created and wrote about.
He testing out the new APIs such as the touch API where he worked with drag and drop:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


node.ontouchmove = function(e){


  if(e.touches.length == 1){ // Only deal with one finger


    var touch = e.touches[0]; // Get the information [...]

Remember the Web Apps; Don’t forget the first iPhone baby today

We see the birth of the second baby when it comes to building and running apps on the iPhone. People have already spent almost $100k in the first few hours of the AppStore not being open, so tomorrow is likely to be a great day for Apple, and developers, as people run around clicking on [...]

YPulse: Fades and Pulsations Library

Kent Johnson has released YPulse a simple open source wrapper for the YUI Animation library that makes creating highlight fades and pulsing button glows a bit easier.
You pulse away with something like:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var pulser = new YAHOO.squarebits.YPulse(


  ‘my-div’,


  ‘backgroundColor’,


  ‘#FFFFFF’, // starting


  ‘#FFFF00′, // ending


  0.75, // The number of seconds for the start-end transition


  [...]

A safety fence for your property lookups

Michal Till posted a little JavaScript tip that he uses to create a safety fence for accessing properties:

As we all know, null not only does not have any properties, but their existence also can not be tested. So null.property retuns error instead of undefined.
You can end up with something like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


if (


(node) &&


(node.nextSibling) &&


(node.nextSibling.className [...]

Ojay 0.2: easy keyboarding, a validation DSL, and two new UI widgets

James Coglan has updated Ojay, the chaining wrapper for YUI that we posted on a few months back.
The new release features really simple keyboard and form scripting and couple of new UI widgets, a new event system and a stack of other improvements:

Ojay.Forms. By far the biggest new package, Ojay.Forms sorts out a real pain [...]

Code specialization; Namespaces again; Parasitic inheritance

Karl Krukow has a new blog that has some interesting Ajax content. Rather than pick at one, we have a synopsis of a few of his recent posts:
Manual code specialization
A technique is presented (in terms of examples) which can give performance boosts in certain situations. The technique relies on higher-order functions, and sharing variables in [...]

Reverse Autocomplete; The details matter

Autocomplete was one of the first Ajax patterns to come about. We often talk about how it looks, but the how it works part is what really matters. How smart is the algorithm to work out what you are completing against? How long do you go before you kick in to see a result? Does [...]

Power, Authority, and Blame

Alex Russell has another one of his insightful posts titled Power and Authority. He talks about the core tenets and then ties it to the W3C, and who we should be "blaming" for the slow upgrade of the Web, and it requires a look in the mirror:

As a case study in putting your faith in [...]

Passpack releases Host-Proof Hosting Library

Passpack notified me about their new library to support Host-Proof Hosting (HPH) development (touched on earlier). The library allows anyone to set up HPH on their own infrastructure. It’s mostly a browser-side library powered by JQuery, focused on transferring encrypted data, and there’s also some sample server-side PHP code.

I think the most important part of [...]

Extending Firebug Tutorials

Jan Odvarko, a member of the Firebug Working Group, has kicked out a set of tutorials on extending Firebug.
If you have some functionality that fits into the performance world, instead of creating a new plugin, you can embrace and extend Firebug as other great tools such as YSlow have done.
To learn more, read up on:

Part [...]

Unobtrusive DOM 2 Event implementation for IE; Uniform Event Model revisited

Tavs Dokkedahl sent in a great email about work that he and Allan Jacobs have done on bringing DOM event implementations to IE. Here it is in full:
About a year ago or so I put out the Uniform Event Model (UEM) script which
was an implementation of the W3C DOM 2 Event Interface for IE. As [...]

Webslug: The hot or not of website performance tools

Kimble Young has created Webslug, the “hot or not of website performance.”
It was inspired by webwait but lets you compare the load times of sites and records every performance test for later analysis like browser used, country of origin, top competitors etc.
For example, comparing reddit to Digg:

It is useful to compare versions of your own [...]

Spacius - Nintendo meets JavaScript - again!

Fellow Yahoo Matt Hackett took a leaf out of Jacob Seidelin’s book and started converting old school arcade games to JavaScript. Instead of using Canvas his only “non JavaScript” solution is playing the music with Scott Schiller’s Sound Manager (which, as we know, uses Flash under the hood).
You can come down with 8 bit shoot-em-up [...]

Offline Access to Dojo Resources

Ever had a situation where you’ve desperately needed to get API information for your favorite toolkit only to find that the site is offline for some reason? The Dojo Toolbox aims to tackle this through the use of Adobe’s AIR runtime. Built using the Dojo framework, the Dojo Toolbox allows for offline viewing of Dojo’s [...]

Ext GWT 1.0: GWT 1.5 support, new APIs, performance, and docs

Darrell Meyer has announced Ext GWT 1.0. This is the first fully stable release of the product and it includes a lot of goodies including:

Documentation: new screencasts of the various steps
GWT 1.5 support: “Ext GWT is a 100% native GWT application written in Java. Ext GWT does not wrap any 3rd party JavaScript and does [...]

Legitimizing Comet with HTML 5 WebSocket

PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var conn = new WebSocket("ws://www.example.com/livedemo");


 


conn.onopen = function(evt) { alert("Conn opened"); }


conn.onread = function(evt) { alert("Read: " + evt.data); }


conn.onclose = function(evt) { alert("Conn closed"); }


 


conn.send("Hello World")


 





What if that code was part of an HTML standard? Would that make you feel better about Comet-style applications? Well, Michael Carter has pointed us to the HTML 5 [...]

The Pencil Project

José Jeria pointed us to a great looking XUL application that allows you to sketch GUI's and then export them to PNG:

With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.
Pencil will always be free and can run on [...]

JavaScript, Rebranded….. Check.

Michael Mahemoff has a nice little post on the rebranding of JavaScript. It kicked off when he was listening to Steve Yegge on rebranding:

He talks about how languages are branded, e.g. “Java” is enterprise. One of his main points is that brands are “const identifiers”, i.e. it takes an entire generation to change brand perception, [...]

LLVM and running C as well as Python in the browser

Dan Morrill doesn’t like JavaScript 2. His reasoning is a little like the folks who don’t want Java.Next to try to copy features from every other language, but to just be the best static language, and let other languages like Scala, Groovy, JRuby (and the hundreds of others like Fan) go in different directions on [...]

W3C Event Debugging; Gears and AIR, not versus; Host-Proof Hosting library

A couple of posts from my personal land that are related to the Ajax world:

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Exploring GWT Linkers

Alex Moffat has written up an exploration of GWT linkers. It looks at the linking part of the GWT compilation step using as an example a linker that creates a sort of manifest for the JavaScript files created by compilation so that you can easily tell which file goes with which browser/locale/etc. combination.

In GWT 1.5 [...]

SoundManager 2 Update: Flash 9 and Chorus effects

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qUIpt: caching JS in window.name

Mario Heiderich has released qUIpt, a library that uses the window.name property to store away useful data, in this case JavaScript.
How does it work?

It checks for the contents of window.name while your page is being loaded.
If there’s nothing inside the window.name cache the JS files defined by you are fetched via XHR
The [...]

Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Road Map

Microsoft has come out with a road map for the Ajax side of ASP.NET, which has been simplified to be just: Framework and tools in one versioned package; Ajax components will be released separately on Codeplex.
There is a bold goal at the beginning of the document (why is the doc a PDF/.doc and not just [...]

Talking to .NET on the server with Jaxer

What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer.
This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out.
PLAIN [...]

Evil GIFs: Hiding Java in your image

What if you could encode a Jar file as an image and trick the browser to run it? This is what Ben Lorica reported from a black hat briefing webinar:

During a recent webinar to promote the upcoming Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas, a group of hackers announced the creation of a hybrid file that [...]

IE8 showing how serious it is about security

The IE8 team has created a blitz on its blog with a slew of posts on security. There is a ton of great stuff here, and is well worth going into detail on each post:
IE8 and Trustworthy Browsing
At first they set the scene:

This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The [...]

ratproxy: Rat out those security issues in your Web app

Michal Zalewski, of Google, has released ratproxy, a tool to test your Web application against attacks such as XSS and XSRF:

Ratproxy is a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. It is meant to complement active crawlers and manual proxies more commonly used for this task, and is optimized specifically for an accurate and [...]

OpenLaszlo 4.1: DHTML ready for primetime

OpenLaszlo is a fascinating project, and got even more interesting when they went meta, and allowed you to general Ajax applications as well as SWF ones. The 4.1 release is a big one, as it brings full parity to the Ajax side of the house:

OpenLaszlo 4.1 is a major release bringing full support for both [...]

JavaScript Plugins; The beauty of loosely coupled code

James Coglan wrote a piece on There is no such thing as a JavaScript plugin that uses jQuery as a use case for how simple it is to have a plugin contract.
When you think about plugins in many environments, you have strict contracts through interfaces that you have to implement. With jQuery, you can just [...]

Shrinking frameworks; Dojo in 6k

Dojo is a framework that you can bend for your needs. You have very fine grained control on what you want in your base dojo.js, how other components are loaded, and a final custom JavaScript file.
Brad Neuberg showed a project, SearchTools, that added local search via Gears, and had a custom Dojo that wasn't Dojo [...]

eval(’foo=a’, obj.fn); How you will be private in Firefox 3.1

Peter realized that the eval(string, scope) support in Firefox meant that the private pattern could be gotten around and developers came out saying “doh!”
Mozilla was quick on the case, and Firefox has taken out support which we should see in Firefox 3.1.
What is interesting is John’s look at what happened. He points to Brendan:
3.2 <fur> [...]

Starfield Sim Picasa Gallery with Prototype

Asad Sheth has been playing with a Starfield Sim Picasa Gallery using Prototype. He said:

I think it’s an interesting way to think about temporally organized data (I could see RSS feeds navigated through some similar mechanism, with the z-axis being time and the x- and y-axes being some kind of similarity measure), and further display [...]

Loom: Annotation based Java framework

Ignacio Coloma has announced Loom 1.0 RC 1. Loom is an annotation-based java web framework that includes a ton of new features in this release. After some selective process, these are the bits that could be of most interest for Ajax developers:

Generates HTML 5 markup (with data-* fields), including CSS classes
with the property type.

Based on [...]

State of Ajax for June 2008: Apple flexes Open Web muscles

June was a great month for the Open Web. First, Apple delivered a one-two punch with showing Mobile Me, powered by the native Web and SproutCore, and showing SquirrelFish as JavaScript starts to get a loooot faster on browsers. Firefox had a party as millions of people downloaded Firefox 3 final release, and immediately talked [...]

SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news

Google and Adobe have been working on improving the indexing of Flash applications. In the past we could simply look at the SWF files and try to grab strings out of them, but there was zero context.
To go further Google uses the SWF Searchable work from Adobe to be more of a ‘human’ actor on [...]

Infinite Web 2.0 Image with GWT

Didier Girard pinged us about Farbtube:

This Web 2.0 / GWT example allows to draw on an infinite canvas and to see others changes immediately. It works like Google Maps: Use the “Move” cursor to walk around the canvas

Time for graffiti.

TCPSocket: Sockets in the browser

Michael Carter of Orbited has written about how he now likes to call Comet sockets in the browser, and has an implementation available that looks like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


var conn = new TCPSocket(hostname, port)


 


conn.onopen = function() { alert('connection opened!') }


conn.onread = function(data) { alert('RECEIVE: ' + data) }


conn.onclose = function(data) { alert('connection closed!') }


 


conn.send('Hello World');


 






The above [...]

MooWheel and MooCirclePack for visualizations

MooWheel, the JavaScript connections visualization library, has been updated to version 0.2.
Updates include:

New data format
Text can now be hovered over, in addition to the dot
Images can be added for each item

You can see the popular Twitter example
(thanks to Augsto Becciu, creator of TweetWheel).
Also, MooCirclePack has just been released:
MooCirclePack is another stunning visualization [...]

CSS Variables are …. here!

We talked about how CSS variables are next a few months back, and now they are here!

WebKit now has an experimental implementation of CSS variables:
You can test this feature using a WebKit nightly
Test cases

Once again, via Dylan Schiemann.

ShiftZoom: Zoomify your oversize images

ShiftZoom 1.0 is the latest tool from Christian Effenberger that allows you to add zoom and pan functionality to oversized images on your webpages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean. Requires no plugin/extension or any other external resource!
It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE [...]