jQuery.com redesigned with a Rock Star

When I was doing an interview with John Resig for the Open Web Podcast, he mentioned that the redesign of jQuery.com had a lot of people talking, and it seems like people have strong feelings about the Rock Star for whatever reason. Ignoring the style, the redesign is more than just that: The entirety of the site [...]

GWT 1.5 final release is shipped and out the door

I have seen the GWT team working very hard indeed on GWT 1.5, and they must be very happy to see the final release shipped and complete: GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you’re counting. We’re also happy that one of those is issue 168, [...]

qooxdoo 0.8: new GUI toolkit and tool chain

qooxdoo 0.8 has been released and it appears to have a lot of big changes. Andreas Ecker told us a little about it: While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were [...]

Degrading script tags for fun and profit

John Resig posted on degrading script tags and adding functionality to <script> so you can add a src attribute and a body of code that will be executed one the external script loaded error free: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   <script src="some-lib.js">   var foo = use_some_lib();   foo.do.stuff(); </script>   To make this all work, John shows us a jquery aware version that detects [...]

The Ajax Experience Framework Summit

We talked a few months ago about something new we're doing at the Ajax Experience this year: the "Framework Summit." Basically, we're providing space for Prototype, jQuery, and Dojo to hold their own half-day events on-site, and these events are free and open to the general public. Since we announced the summit, the frameworks have [...]

Inkscape: Open Source Drawing for SVG

I recently ran across Inkscape, an open source very high-quality graphics editor that can output SVG that I’m blown away by. Even better, it runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. From the Inkscape website: [Inkscape is] an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C [...]

The State of SVG Browser Support + Using Flash for SVG in Internet Explorer

As part of the Open Web Advocacy work I’ve started with Dion and others at Google, one of my goals right now is to help increase awareness and support around doing 2-D/vector graphics on the open web. This includes tools such as the Canvas tag, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML markup language for vector [...]

In Praise of Evolvable Systems

I met with a colleague recently who wants to take his project and create a standard on the web that actually gets adopted. We talked for a long time, and when we finished up I pointed him at a paper that had a huge impact on me, called “In Praise of Evolvable Systems” by Clay [...]

GALGWT 1.0… it isn’t a land next to Mordor

GWT has long had a project that aimed to give rich support for Google APIs called GALGWT, or “Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit”. This project has stepped up to higher gear recently, and we have seen the GALGWT 1.0 release candidate appear. What is in GALGWT? The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java [...]

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Web Standards

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released today. There are several cool UI enhancements that this beta brings to the table that I won't cover in this post, but you can learn more about them on the IEBlog. Instead, I want to talk about how beta 2 affects IE's relationship to web standards. First, CSS Expressions [...]

YouTube Uploader now using Gears, and what people missed in Gears 0.4

While we posted about the Gears 0.4 features a lot of the press only really talked about the Geolocation piece. I think that is important, and posted on that too, but Brad's piece discussed the full gamut including the Blob API, resummable HTTP, and Desktop API improvements to allow controlled file system access. The example [...]

Proxy issues with querystrings in path names

You have seen this before: /path/to/something.js?v=2, or maybe it used a date or a version control id or some such. The notion of putting the version into the URL so you can aggressively cache and yet quickly push new versions. There has long been issues with using the querystring as the version. At some point I [...]

Towards Using Custom Fonts

A little while ago, we talked about the two competing custom font technologies for the Web: linking and "embedding" (aka EOT). With Firefox about to implement support for linking à la Safari, John Allsopp has a summary of the state of font technologies and an illustration of just how easy it is to use these [...]

Ubiquity: Quicksilver of the Firefox browser

Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team have launched Ubiquity the command line tool that they have been talking about for awhile. Ubiquity is "experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily." The overall [...]

Using CSS to do the print watermark technique

Andy Pemberton has put together a simple solution to get the watermark technique to work nicely with print CSS. Check out the sample and pull up a print preview. He details the good, bad, and ugly: The Good The first step to getting a printable watermark is to use an inline tag, rather than background-images. In most [...]

jParallax Turns Elements into a Viewport

In the “oh wow, I didn’t know JavaScript could do that” category, I just came across a cool new jQuery plugin called jParallax which implements a parallax effect on selected elements. Now, I’m not ashamed to admit not knowing what “parallax” meant so I looked it up on Wikipedia which totally added closure to the [...]

navigator.geolocation: Using the W3C Geolocation API today

Last week I wrote a simple WhereAreYou? application that used the Google Ajax APIs ClientLocation API to access your location via your IP address. At the same time, we announced support for the Gears Geolocation API that can calculate your address using a GPS device, WiFi info, cell tower ids, and IP address lookups. Add to all [...]

Firebug 1.2: The final release is out there

John has announced the Firebug 1.2 final release. As well as just supporting Firefox 3, there are some quality improvements: The Script panel (the JavaScript debugger), the Net panel (network monitoring), and Console panel have all seen considerable updates. They’re all much more performant and have a huge number of bug fixes. Specifically the Console panel has [...]

Understanding context in your New Tab

Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team looks like they are having a lot of fun. They have been putting up proposals for new UIs and the latest involves a smarter new tab screen.
Aza discusses how opening a blank screen doesn’t really help you. Opera already allows you to have a quick dial screen show [...]

Want a Free Pass to The Ajax Experience?

That’s right, a free pass! We are raffling off one free pass to The Ajax Experience show in Boston, September 29 – October 1. That means that you can attend the $1495 event for free, courtesy of Ajaxian.com.
There’s no catch. We are giving away one free pass to The Ajax Experience. The free pass only [...]

Razor Profiler: Check out your Ajax code

Razor Profiler is a web-based Ajax profiling tool to help web developers understand and analyze the runtime behavior of their JavaScript code in a cross-browser environment. Razor Profiler can be access either online as a service; or be downloaded to run locally, and was created by Coach Wei who has done a lot of work [...]

Putting together GWT and Spring

Dave Kuhn has put together a comprehensive guide to piecing together GWT and Spring, a nice recipe for the Java heads among you.
Dave starts out by detailing why you would want to do this, and how it changes the architecture of your application.
He then gets to a tutorial that has you creating the project correctly, [...]

ImageInfo: reading image metadata (EXIF) with JavaScript

Jacob Seidelin finishes up his binary meme with a post on reading image metadata with JavaScript via a library that groks EXIF data.

It tries to detect the format of the image file and then reads the header and pulls out information about dimensions and color depth among other things. If the EXIF data library is [...]

Sizzle: John Resig has a new selector engine

John Resig is working on a new selector engine called Sizzle:

This is a new selector engine that I'm working on.
It's a work in progress! Not ready for use yet!
It's definitely not ready yet (got some minor outlier bugs in the standards-compliant browsers - and a bunch of major bugs in IE still left to tackle) [...]

JavaScript JIT: The Dream Gets Closer (in Firefox)

For years, many of us have been salivating over the idea of JIT’ed JavaScript in the browser. Adobe’s JIT’ing Flash VM showed a preview of tremendous speed gains to be had, but we’ve had to wait until SquirrelFish from WebKit to see anything dramatic happen in the browser.
Until now.
Mozilla just let the cat out of [...]

Gears 0.4 + Mashup of Gears and Google App Engine

Hi folks, this is my first guest blog post here on Ajaxian. It’s great to join the team.
Gears, the open source browser plugin that teaches web browsers new tricks, has pushed out a new 0.4 release. 
Andrei Popescu from the Gears team lets us in on some of the nifty new features:
We have added a new [...]

The Ajax Experience: Early Bird Deadline is Today!

The $100 early bird discount for The Ajax Experience expires today, August 22! Don’t wait! Register now to reserve your spot at the lowest price.
The Ajax Experience conference takes place September 29 – October 1 in Boston. Register today to save $100 with the early bird rate.
The Ajax Experience is the original [...]

HTML 5: The event loop, hashchange, and more

Mark Pilgrim continues to keep us up to date with news in HTML 5 land. This week he talks to us about the birth of the event loop, and the hashchange event.
I saw this just after posting about the cross browser hashchange example by Zach Leatherman. In the future we will see a nice, standard [...]

The Ajax Experience: Early Bird Deadline is Today!

The $100 early bird discount for The Ajax Experience expires today, August 22! Don’t wait! Register now to reserve your spot at the lowest price.
The Ajax Experience conference takes place September 29 – October 1 in Boston. Register today to save $100 with the early bird rate.
The Ajax Experience is the original [...]

Emulating onhashchange without setInterval

IE 8 has an onhashchange event, and Ajax history / bookmark management has been a long time problem of choice for developers.
Zach Leatherman has revisited the problem and has another solution that doesn’t require setInterval to check on the location.

On initialization, we load an iframe onto the page that is positioned absolutely at -500px,-500px so [...]

WARNING: JSLint may continue to hurt your feelings

JSLint is an old tool in the toolbox, created by Douglas Crockford. I am sure you know about it. But, do you know how often it is updated?
You may notice the “Edition 2008-08-18″ on the site, which shows that it was updated recently. After being on the jslint group, I see that there are very [...]

Bomberman in MooTools

Munteanu Gabriel has created today’s Friday JavaScript game. It is an old favourite…. Bomberman.
Munteanu has released the code as an open source project, and you can get going to bomb away now

Page Test: Run AOL’s tool in the cloud, then sit back and wait

Patrick Meenan has setup an IE7 instance in Virginia that we can poke to do an AOL Page Test.
You give it a URL and some options such as the number of runs, whether to see the first and repeat views, and off it runs.
When finished you get to see the results which give you high [...]

Ajax Head Pattern; Unobtrusive Rails Apps

Ken Collins has rewritten his Homemarks application, a Rails app that "allows you to dynamically create and sort Columns, Boxes, and Bookmarks into your own custom start page."
What is interesting about the rewrite is the new approach that Ken took; the Ajax Head Pattern as he described it:

HomeMarks was built using the Ruby on Rails [...]

querySelectorAll is coming fast

We have all been talking about querySelectAll for awhile, but John Resig gives us a wrap-up that covers the state of play.
He talks about the browsers, and the libraries that wrap them and clean up shop via code like:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


 


function querySelectorAll(selector){


  try {


    return Array.prototype.slice.call(


      document.querySelectorAll( selector ) );


  } catch(e){}


 


  return [...]

Chain.js: jQuery Data Binding Service

Rizqi Ahmad has created a data binding service for jQuery called Chain.js.
A simple example shows you where to start. When given HTML like:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


<div id="quickdemo">


    <div class="item"><span class="library">Library Name</span></div>


</div>


 





The following JavaScript will add data as items to the list:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


$('#quickdemo')


    .items([


        {library:'Prototype'},


        {library:'jQuery'},


        {library:'Dojo'},


  [...]

Making creating DOM-based applications less of a hassle

Creating a lot of HTML using DOM methods can be a real pain. This is what students of the Juku training course that I held two weeks ago found out quite quickly and complained about the verbosity of it all. I listened to their concerns and came up with a framework for JavaScript applications called
ViewsHandler. [...]

The lessons of CSS frameworks

Jeremy Keith has been doing a great job blogging An Event Apart, and his writeup of The Lessons of CSS Frameworks by Eric Meyer caught my eye.
Eric took a look at the most popular CSS frameworks (960, Blueprint, Content With Style, That Standards Guy, YAML, YUI, Elements, Tripoli, WYMStyle) and talks about choosing one...

Let’s get [...]

Running server side processes via JavaScript with Jaxer

Tom Kirkpatrick has written about a new API in Jaxer, Jaxer.Process, that allows you to call out to the host operating system. His example has a call out to get the uptime on the machine:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


<script runat="server-proxy">


function runUptime() {


      // run the uptime and return the output from STDOUT


      return Jaxer.Process.exec("/usr/bin/uptime");


}


</script>


 





You [...]

WaveMaker 4: Point and Click Ajax

WaveMaker Studio 4.0 the Ajax based visual development platform for creating web applications has been released. Version 4.0 includes a new look and feel, usability improvements, and a host of new features.

Building applications has been made easier by a syntax highlighting code editor, improved widget drag and drop, undo, simplified data binding, more flexible css [...]

Ra Ajax: Ajax for .NET

Thomas Hansen is a vocal member of the community, and worked on Gaia Widgets in the past. Now he has moved on to create his own opensource library Ra Ajax, an Ajax library for .NET. (He has posted the bloody details of how he "left").
He is experimenting, and writing up a series of "how to [...]

Reading ID3 tags with JavaScript

Jacob Seidelin is up to more tricks, this time playing with the binary side of life and writing a library that can reading ID3 tags from MP3 files and such.
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


// URL of the mp3 file (must be on the same domain!)


var file = "mymusicfile.mp3";


 


// define your own callback function


function mycallback() {


 // either call the [...]

Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Show/Hide Login Panel Built with MooTools

Conserving screen real-estate while still providing good content to the user has always been a challenge for designers and developers and while larger screen dimensions are becoming more prominent, it's still important to take full advantage of the space available to you. Jeeremie over at Web Kreation came up with a very cool method of [...]

Getting method_missing, or _noSuchMethod into Harmony

Yehuda Katz saw the Harmony news, and wondered if there was a change to get _noSuchMethod, which currently works in implementations such as SpiderMonkey, into the new JavaScript world of: Harmony = ES3.1++.

In summary, it seems that the two groups agreed to focus cooperative effort of ECMAScript 3.1, a modest improvement of the current JavaScript [...]

SmartGWT: LGPL GWT wrapper on SmartClient

Sanjiv Jivan, original creator of GWT-Ext, posted on SmartGWT, a new wrapper on top of SmartClient.
Charles Kendrick of Isomorphic, creator of SmartClient, announced the new project as well as the approach they have taken:

we’ve taken an approach of generating GWT code from SmartClient’s documentation, combined with hand-coding portions that can’t feasibly be generated. By tweaking [...]

ECMA What? Harmony Who? TC39? Tamarin? JavaScript!

Alex Russell has seen the confusion of the many names that were bandied around with the Harmony news last week. There are so many names, that involve specs, projects, and general technical jargon that it can get a little confusing. Alex has made it very clear:

ECMAScript 3
Aka: JavaScript, ES3, ECMAScript 262-3, and JScript.
The current JavaScript [...]

Transformie: Implement WebKit CSS transforms in IE

Paul Bakaus, or jQuery UI fame, has created a nice little hack to implement WebKit CSS transforms in IE

When you include the library, it can scan for your -webkit-transform-* transforms (soon to support the standard transform-*) and will go to work for you using a couple of nifty technologies all put together:

IE Filters such as [...]

Nice new Dojo aggregate effects

Dojo has some nice new compound effects in the works. Some of the new effects include block fades, disintergrate, explode, shear, and pinwheel.
Each effect can be tweaked with config such as:

The number of rows and columns in which to split the element
The distance the pieces travel (as a multiple of the element's respective dimensions)
Whether or [...]

A simple solution to the “other” problem with select boxes

Jeffrey Olchovy has posted a simple tutorial on using jQuery to solve a "select-to-input toggle" that shows and hides a text field when you select "Other". It overloads the same form name, so the server side gets just one value, and doesn't know or care if it was in the drop down or typed in. [...]

Getting a JavaScript stracktrace in any browser

Eric Wendelin has posted on getting a JavaScript stack trace no matter that the browser.
With Firebug you can call console.trace() but what about the rest?
Luke Smith took Eric's work and added to it, ending up with:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


(function () {


YOUR_NAMESPACE.getStackTrace = (function () {


 


var mode;


try {(0)()} catch (e) {


    mode = e.stack ? 'Firefox' : [...]

ECMAScript Harmony: Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford, Adobe, and more

ECMAScript Harmony has been the big news of the week. It isn’t hard to see why, the next version of JavaScript is going to affect us all, for a long time (even more than a presidents term!)
Alex Russell, John Resig, and myself got Brendan Eich and Arun Ranganathan on the phone to talk about the [...]

Custom events as API end points for key bindings and more

Inspired by the Gmail team and how they created well known Greasemonkey endpoints and the custom events work that I have been doing, I was lead to play with custom events as a way to tie into key bindings. This lead to the following post on my blog:
On the back of my example enjoying the [...]

HTML5 Live DOM Validator

Henri Sivonon has taken Hixie’s Live DOM Viewer, and is now running the Validator.nu HTML Parser within it, using GWT 1.5 RC2, which fixed a bug to do with JavaScript in hosted mode.
Simply open the tool and put in some markup and see the puppy run. Below is an example that I saw on Sam [...]

AppJet improves, and teaches you along the way

AppJet, the server side JavaScript Y Combinator startup, has been improving all the time, including these new updates which allow for better database work:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


storage.threads


  .sortBy('-timestamp') //sort first so we skip the right ones


  .skip(start)


  .limit(items)


  .forEach(function(thread){


          printp(thread.text)


  })


 





Also, they just released a bunch of tutorials that cover JavaScript and HTML [...]

YUI 3: The goals are lighter, faster, consistent, power, secure

YUI 3 has a preview release for us to check out.
The goals are:

lighter (less K-weight on the wire and on the page for most uses)
faster (fewer http requests, less code to write and compile, more efficient code)
more consistent (common naming, event signatures, and widget APIs throughout the library)
more powerful (do more with less [...]

clientside.cnet.com relaunched with new tutorials and more

Aaron Newton has relaunched clientside.cnet.com with a cleaner, leaner, look and feel. The news for the launch is:

The Mootorial (the MooTools tutorial) is now updated for MooTools 1.2 and on it's own domain www.mootorial.com
The wikiTorials(tm! - not really) for all of CNET's codebase have been updated for our updated 1.2 code (which launched in June)
The [...]

This Week in HTML 5: Navigator standardization, Worker, and more

Mark Pilgrim has released his second This Week in HTML 5 episode that covers window.navigator, a new Worker, talk on alt, and more.
Navigator standardization

The navigator attribute of the Window interface must return an instance of the Navigator interface, which represents the identity and state of the user agent (the client), and allows Web pages to [...]

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja: A sneak peak for Ajaxians

John Resig is working on the Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja book, which I am sure will be a success.
Manning has been kind enough to give us a sneak peak at some of the chapters:
How closures work
This content introduces the closure, an important aspect of JavaScript, and describes its use. It goes into detail on [...]

ECMAScript Harmony: Coming together after Oslo

I discussed my worries about JavaScript 2 recently. I could only do so as I saw some light at the end of the tunnel. That light came from an ECMA meetup in Oslo where it seems people came together to rally behind the idea that something needs to be done.
Brendan Eich posted to a mailing [...]

border-image: No more cutting up hell

Remember when you wanted a growable area with rounded-goodness and you had to cut up the image into a million pieces to have the top corners and the sides? Since then we have gotten nice effects to help us, and John Resig just posted on how Firefox 3.1 will implement what WebKit already has [...]

More on codecs: Apple’s view, and the BBC makes a move

We just talked about codecs, and in particular the world of Ogg.
Mozilla came out supporting the format, and saying that we should see it in Firefox 3.1. Niall Kennedy then reminded me of a post, way back in time, by David Singer of Apple discussing the research that Apple did into Ogg:

Preamble
The HTML5 specification contains [...]

Prefer Ruby syntax? See Red, and your Ruby will convert to JS

I am a fan of Ruby, and when I saw Red the framework that allows you to write Ruby and get JavaScript out the other end I was excited. It allows you to write this:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:



class MyClass
   @@my_var = 500
   
   def initialize(arg)
     @arg = arg
   end
   def my_method
     alert(@arg)
   end
end




And you end [...]

Tripeedo: Command line for travel

Tripeedo is a new little site that uses Prototype to power a command line for travel. You just type in where you want to go and when, and it will launch you into a search. I really enjoy the command line interfaces, and much prefer them to the long forms that travel sites put [...]

Do you want some Ogg in your <video> or <audio>?

Codecs. Codecs. Codecs. Having <video> and <audio> tags in HTML 5 is great and all, but what formats can be played?
If you want something that everyone could play (everyone == not just people who pay the MPEG licenses) what do you have left? Ogg? Some argue about the quality of Ogg, and others play the [...]

gopher away in JavaScript

I was at the University of Minnesota when Gopher, the Internet protocol, was in its prime. It was created by a professor at the University of Minnesota you see, and I had to help implement gopher services.
When the Web kicked off, they still tried to hang on, but made the fatal mistake of not having [...]

Squirreling out the Fish on the iPhone

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:




 


<script type="text/javascript">


function recurse(n) {


    if (n> 0) {


        return recurse(n - 1);


    }


    return 0;


}


 


try {


    // recurse(43687);  // Highest that works for me in WebKit


                        // nightly builds as of 24 Jul 2008.


    // [...]

mtjs_iepnghandler: more PNG support for IE 6

Micah Tischler wasn't happy with the variety of approaches for allowing transparent PNG support in IE 6, so he continued his work with mtjs_iepnghandler which intelligently provides true background repeat functionality for transparent PNGs as well as full positioning.

In this script image tags are supported, both with and without a blank spacer GIF, and background [...]

img2json: get your image metadata via App Engine

The tradition of placing small, useful services on App Engine continues. This time, Adam Burmister has created img2json, a Google AppEngine service that extracts metadata from image URLs.
The metadata can be as simple as width, height, mime type, file size, but it also extract EXIF metadata (camera make, manufacturer, GPS positioning, orientation, etc).
To use the [...]

button versus input[type="submit"] in IE and beyond

Drew McLellan has written a post on Coping With Internet Explorer's Mishandling of Buttons which delves into browser differences with respect to <button> versus <input type="submit" ...>
First, buttons themselves:

One of the more exasperating quirks of Internet Explorer is the way it mishandles BUTTON elements. If you’re not all that familiar with HTML buttons (and don’t [...]

MockMe: A new JavaScript mocking framework

Johannes Link is an Agile fellow who wasn't 100% happy with the existing JavaScript unit test frameworks, and he explained why. He gives an example:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


  testDoubleSpeaker: function() { with(this) {


    var actualMsg = null;


    var mockSay = function(msg) {


      actualMsg = msg;


    };


    Speaker.say = mockSay;


    DoubleSpeaker.say('oops');


  [...]

Conditional-CSS: Inline browser specific CSS

Allan Jardine has created Conditional-CSS, a tool that allows a style sheet author to place IE style conditional statements inline with CSS to target multiple different browsers.

Expanding the IE conditional statement syntax we get:
PLAIN TEXT
CSS:




 


   [if {!} browser]     or


   [if {!} browser version]     or


   [if {!} condition browser version]


 





Of course, browsers are getting [...]

Do you want some Ogg in your or ?

Codecs. Codecs. Codecs. Having <video> and <audio> tags in HTML 5 is great and all, but what formats can be played?
If you want something that everyone could play (everyone == not just people who pay the MPEG licenses) what do you have left? Ogg? Some argue about the quality of Ogg, and others play the [...]

On Fighting the Web; The invitation

But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in [...]

Open Web Podcast Episode 1: HTML 5 news, Web Workers, W3C Selectors, and Dojo happenings

Welcome to the inaugural episode of a new podcast to cover news, happenings, and our opinions on the Open Web (download the Open Web Podcast episode one directly or subscribe to it). When I say “our” I am talking about the founding podcasters: Alex Russell, John Resig, and myself. It is a pleasure to be [...]

Firebug Working Group Meetup

Steve Souders hosted the Firebug Working Group meeting at Google last week, and after seeing how detailed his notes are I wish I could hire him as my personal assistant ;)

Highlights
Firebug 1.2 is nearing final beta. After testing it’ll be promoted to stable. The main focus for the next release is going to be performance, [...]

Raphaël: Simple graphics wrapper on top of SVG and VML

Dmitry Baranovskiy of Atlassian has created Raphaël "a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library."

Raphaël uses SVG and VML as a base for graphics creation. Because [...]

JSBridge: Powering Mozilla with Python

JSBridge is an incredibly alpha, but interesting new project, lead by Mikeal Rogers, that bridges Python and JavaScript with respect to Mozilla. It uses mozrunner, the Python library that can power Mozilla applications (e.g. Firefox).
Once you fire up jsbridge MozRepl will kick into gear, and you will be able to interact across the bridge. "This [...]

Tombs of Asciiroth: GWT, Gears, and AIR enabled RPG Game

Alx Dark has created The Tombs of Asciiroth a fully functional roguelike-meets-puzzle-arcade game.
Asciiroth is a a complete, functional, open source game, written using GWT, and distributed either as an Adobe AIR application, or as a game you can play over the web. In the latter case, it uses Gears to provide saved game support. [...]

This Week in HTML 5: Mark Pilgrim’s new blog series

I am really jazzed about the first entry in a new series on HTML 5. Mark Pilgrim (of Python, Greasemonkey, Open Web, writer extraordinaire, and creator of Google Doctype) has started the series This Week in HTML 5 which aims to keep us up to speed on the spec, and progress across the board (what [...]

AIRing out your Lingerie; Running applications for the articles

I was wary about posting on this one, as it does involve scantily clad women. If that offends you, skip now, and please accept my apologies, and I know that this probably fits better for a Friday Fun posting, but let’s get to it:

Ok, so when I was on the Adobe AIR tour, some folks [...]

This Week in HTML 5: Mark Pilgrim’s new blog series

I am really jazzed about the first entry in a new series on HTML 5. Mark Pilgrim (of Python, Greasemonkey, Open Web, writer extraordinaire, and creator of Google Doctype) has started the series This Week in HTML 5 which aims to keep us up to speed on the spec, and progress across the board (what [...]

CSS variables considered harmful?

Bert Bos, a W3C fellow, thinks that CSS variables are to be considered harmful:

Adding any form of macros or additional scopes and indirections, including symbolic constants, is not just redundant, but changes CSS in ways that make it unsuitable for its intended audience. Given that there is currently no alternative to CSS, these things must [...]

Enjoying the Observer pattern with custom events

I created an introductory example discussing custom events as an implementation of the Observer pattern. I posted this on my personal blog first and quickly got a port from my Prototype version to Malte’s jQuery port. I hope others keep them coming so we can aggregate a simple example of custom events and how it [...]

iPhone Safari Flick Navigation By Example

Matthew Congrove took some time to play with the iPhone SDK, but it wasn't his bag, so he decided to go back to building a Web application for the iPhone, and was pleasantly surprised with the updates to Safari that enabled new things:

In the midst of all my research for help I stumbled across something [...]

Code on Demand: How JavaScript is RESTful

In the code-on-demand style, a client component has access to a set of resources, but not the know-how on how to process them. It sends a request to a remote server for the code representing that know-how, receives that code, and executes it locally.

The above quote comes from the infamous thesis by Roy Fielding which [...]

Introducing HTML into an iframe and getting it back

Michael Mahemof is working a lot with TiddlyWiki and posted on how the project injects HTML into an iframe, and then get them out later. This enables you to use the browser parser to do its thing:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:




 


// put it in


var doc = iframe.document;


if (iframe.contentDocument)


  doc = iframe.contentDocument; // For NS6


else if(iframe.contentWindow)


  doc = iframe.contentWindow.document; [...]

Ext 2.2: History, Selectors, FileUploader, and more

Ext 2.2 has been released, and it has features to complement the usual maintenance bug fixes and performance updates (Ext now works better in Firefox 3).
New features include:

CheckboxGroup / RadioGroup
Technically, while the individual Checkbox and Radio controls are not new, they may as well be, considering the overhaul they have had in this release. Gone [...]

Mozilla creates the concept cars of the Web

The video above is a “concept” called Aurora, created by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. Give it a play and you will see his vision for a very visual immersive, space-age-like environment that is very social.
There are a couple of others too, such as Wei Zhou’s bookmarking concept and Aza Raskin’s mobile phone concept [...]

Facelift Image Replacement; Another look at sIFR type work

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element [...]

JavaScript Overlay Types in GWT

Bruce Johnson of the GWT team has continued the deep dive into GWT with a posting on a new GWT 1.5 feature: JavaScript overlay types. This feature goes beyond the JNSI technique to "make it easy to integrate entire families of JavaScript objects into your GWT project. There are many benefits of this technique, including [...]

GreasePocket: More grease on your iPhone

Although my iPhone screen has enough grease on it, we are now seeing some that is useful. GreasePocket is a Greasemonkey/Kit-like plugin that allows you to write userscripts for your iPhone.
Not only can you access the DOM and such, but you can access device APIs themselves. Thus, you could write a GreasePocket script that talks [...]

MooTools 1.2 Image Protector

It always makes me laugh a little when people try to "protect" things on the Internet. The dwProtector tries to "protect" your images with you just having to:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


window.addEvent('domready', function() {


        var protector = new dwProtector({


                image: '/blank.gif',


                [...]

Django and ExtJS Grids with Filters

Are you an ExtJS and Django user? If so, you will want to check out this article by Matt of Tangible Worldwide on Using ExtJS's Grid Filtering with Django.
He goes into detail on how to tweak the grid filtering system that is aimed at PHP, and getting it to work in a way that allows [...]

The browser landscape; Alex’s Perspective

Flash can get to “ubiquitous” across the entire web with new capabilities in roughly 18 months and the Open Web faces a best case replacement time-frame of 5 years.
Reducing that differential from 42 months to zero is now the defining challenge of the Open Web. HTML is back in the hunt. Time to see how [...]

NoGray Visual Time Picker

The NoGray Time Picker is a component that lets you add a time picker that is visual. The clock shows up, and you move the hands to wherever you need to be. All via a simple:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


var tp = new TimePicker('time2_picker', 'time2', 'time2_toggler', {format24:true});


 





Or a more complex version that tracks the changes:
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JAVASCRIPT:




 


var tp = [...]

Deft-fully using Dojo and Flex

Tom Trenka of SitePen has created a new top-level Dojo package called Deft which "focuses on ActionScript components created in support of the various projects within the Dojo Toolkit (mostly for DojoX). Deft source files are well organized based in part on the organization of other Dojo Toolkit projects, as well as the package structure [...]

Another Jaxer 1.0 Release Candidate with new APIs

Greg Murray has blogged about a new release candidate for Aptana Jaxer that contains a lot of new features.
Kevin Hakman told us about the release:

We've had server-side JS database APIs all along, but now handing result sets is even easier. There's also now full fine grain control and access to the entire communication cycle [...]

Open Web 0.4: Composability, Interop, Ubiquity, and the Client

Brad Neuberg got a huge amount of feedback on his call for a definition of the Open Web. He distilled that information and tried hard to come up with something that fits into one sentence, and ended up with this:

The Open Web is an interoperable, ubiquitous, and searchable network where everyone can share information, integrate, [...]

Cross domain access now, and support for the future

Kris Zyp is really leading the charge on various missions such as JSON-* and XHR-*. This time he has a posting on a new cross-site XHR plugin repository that wraps up the myriad of techniques that are both pending in standards (XDomain, XHR++) and work arounds (window.name, magic iframe hackery). It also falls back to [...]

chosr: Quicksilver interface in the Web

Chosr is another Quicksilver inspired piece of software, that lives in the Web, created by Julius Eckert using GWT.
Very interesting to see the interactions, although I wonder a little on the usage. The great thing about Quicksilver is that you hit a quick key combo and you are there. You type what you need, and [...]

JavaFX: The preview has landed

JavaFX was announced at JavaOne.... in 2007, and we are now seeing a preview release.
Josh Marinacci of the JavaFX team put together a post with an example that builds the following:

The code for this is simply:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVA:




 


package blogdemo;


 


import javafx.scene.*;


import javafx.scene.paint.*;


import javafx.scene.geometry.*;


import javafx.application.*;


import javafx.scene.transform.*;


import javafx.input.*;


import javafx.animation.*;


import java.lang.System;


 


var angle = 0.0;


 


Frame {


    windowStyle: WindowStyle.TRANSPARENT  visible: true


  [...]