ajax

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 are no longer supported in Standards Mode: Also known as 'Dynamic Properties', CSS expressions are a proprietary extension to CSS with a high performance cost. As of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS expressions are not supported in IE8 standards mode. They are still supported in IE7…

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 that Brad built was the upload movie tool which ties this all together. Check out the source code and you will see the parts and pieces in action: Geolocation PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   MovieTool.prototype.getLocation = function(callback) {   var…

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 seem to remember Safari not going a good job caching that scenario and thinking that it was different. Steve "Neo" Souders has posted about this issue especially as it relates to proxy servers and default configurations: There’s a section in my book called Revving Filenames. It…

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 in stylesheets. Once you define a font-face using both linking and EOT thusly: PLAIN TEXT CSS: @font-face {   font-family:"Fenwick";   src: url(fenwick.eot); } PLAIN TEXT CSS: @font-face {   font-family: "Matrix";   src:…

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 goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to: Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with…

Bungee Labs, a well funded Utah based startup that left private beta only six months ago, laid off 15 employees today to give themselves more runway on their cash burn rate. The last we checked they had 38 employees, so this is nearly 40% of their total headcount. CEO Martin Plaehn explained: “This change had less to do with the rate of technology development and more to do with actual versus anticipated rates of adoption. Our Platform-as-a-Service, Bungee Connect, has achieved the level of robustness and capability we envisioned and we are committed to its continued regular advancement…

From: Vanity Fair / Google Date: August 27, 2008 9:06:32 PM PDT To: Michael Arrington Subject: IMPT: Google/Vanity Party Status Reply-To: demconventionparty@google.com Thank you for your interest in the Vanity Fair / Google Party. We have reached full capacity for this event and are unable to accommodate additional guests. If you have NOT received a Confirmation email–separate from the automated RSVP response– and a Party admission card with your name on it, you will not be admitted to the party. No exceptions. If you HAVE received a confirmation email but have NOT picked up your…

Finally, a judge who may have actually visited the Internet once or twice before deciding a case. Judge Howard Lloyd, a judge on the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, threw out adult entertainment company IO Group’s 2006 copyright infringement case against Veoh today. At the time Veoh had some user-uploaded porn on its service that belonged to IO Group. Despite quick takedowns from DMCA notices, IO Group sued anyway. A key issue of the case turned on whether or not Veoh should lose DMCA safe harbor protection because they transcoded user uploaded videos to the…

The business card needs to die, and everyone knows it. They’re clumsy, easy to lose, and virtually useless unless you take the time to enter them into your computer’s address book (they kill trees, too). The cell phone market could easily put business cards out of their misery, but instead of conforming to a single standard for contact exchange, handset manufacturers offer proprietary solutions or none at all. FriendBook, an iPhone application from Tapulous, looked like it might hold the answer. The app uses a physical “handshake” to swap information - users simply put…

I’ve wanted to redesign the Highrise sidebars for a long time. They’ve felt cluttered and messy to me, and as we add more features to Highrise the mess will only multiply. So I was glad to have the chance this week to redesign the sidebar modules. The visual side of the redesign was straightforward, but implementing the design in code required a few tricks. Here’s a look behind the scenes at the coding decisions we made for the new Highrise sidebars. “Subjects” in Highrise Which sidebar modules am I talking about? In Highrise you can keep track of People,…

Today I gave a presentation on why Git makes sense for an agile consultancy like ours. It was more challenging than I initially imagined; there are many, many blog posts out there discussing why Git is technically superior to Subversion. But when I searched for posts discussing the business merits of Git I came up short. Git is faster, branches better, it has a local copy of the repository, it's small and cheap, but these are points that sell an engineer. What sells the administrators, the business analysts, the project managers? I came up with a few cool scenarios to illustrate why we, as a…

I like it. Give me more browser improvements! With the news of Firefox 3.1's JIT JavaScript beasty TraceMonkey, is it too much to hope that IE8 Beta 2 has some similar improvements under the hood? First you have to find the appropriate page among the 300 or so flogging IE8 Beta 2 in the MS redundaverse. Drilling down into performance, you find the terse: ...the script engine in Internet Explorer 8 is significantly faster than in previous versions, minimizing the load time for webpages based on JavaScript or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). OK. Faster. Faster how? How much faster? It…

I was expecting the next major advance in JavaScript for Firefox to come from replacing SpiderMonkey with Tamarin, Adobe's donated VM for ECMAScript 4. In fact, Tamarin can already do some JIT. Now surprise, surprise -- SpiderMonkey can do JIT as well, as Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO describes in his blog. The technique used in both Tamarin and SpiderMonkey is called tracing, where during code execution, each hotspot (code that is executed a whole lot) is traced and compiled, so the next time it is executed, the compiled version is used. The beasty is called TraceMonkey and boasts several…

In last week's post, I introduced the linked multiselect widget I was asked to implement on a tight deadline for an unexpected project assignment. I showed some demo code in action and discussed the user experience issues that shaped my requirements. This week, I'll walk through the actual code - or at least my first pass at it. Like a lot of developers who should know better, I sometimes shirk the technical design phase on quick projects, then regret it later. The code I handed off for this project got the job done, but it wasn't very DRY or elegant. Luckily, I've continued to refine it into…

Image is from Flickr and the Library of Congress collection Can we talk about REST? It's been about two years since the Simply RESTful plugin was added to Rails edge core, in that time I think I've learned the following two things: REST is a very elegant way to structure an external web-service interface to a web application. REST is kind of an awkward way to manage the internal structure of an Ajax-heavy web application. I think you are going to have one of three responses. I'm betting on the middle one: "Everybody knows that" "You are a loser who has obviously not grasped the zen essence of…

From InsideRIA: Dave Johnson, Alexei White and I have finally completed our video training series on Ajax development for high performance and large scale Ajax UIs. We took the book, Enterprise Ajax, we wrote last year and then recorded just over 8hrs worth of Ajax training. Hopefully it’s a bit easier for folks to swallow than the 500 page book;-)

From InsideRIA: Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.

From InsideRIA: Google announced 2 new ways to make your apps location aware yesterday. One’s a web service that any web can take advantage the second is built into Google Gears, and runs on the mobile version of this plugin.

When I saw this I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looks like an upcoming version of Firefox will have run-time byte-code compilation of script, giving near-native code performance to some JavaScript. What does this mean? basically 5 to 6x improvements in performance for many JavaScript-intensive applications. Read all about it here.

From InsideRIA: It might be debatable whether a native app written Objective-C is an RIA, but most of the are internet connected at least part of the time and lots of the coolest iPhone apps I’m using run right in Safari on the iPhone. It’s not however debatable whether or not iPhone has raised the bar for slick and aesthetically pleasing UIs and if you’re going to develop a web app or native app for the iPhone you need to meet that bar to succeed. On that note here are a couple resources to make your iPhone apps look like Apple’s very own apps!

4D have recently released a new version of their Ajax Framework, included in this new release a major enhancement with HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe Air support, In addition to support codeless generation of an Ajax client for the iPhone. Below the press release : Major release features the world's first Flex-to-Database direct connectivity, iPhone 2.0, HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe AIR Support July 24, 2008 - SAN JOSE, CA - 4D, Inc., maker of an integrated software platform that simplifies the process of developing and deploying business applications, announced today the release of 4D Web…

Packt publishing have recently released a new and interesting JavaScript book that teaches users how to create scalable and reusable JavaScript applications and libraries using the concepts of object-oriented programming. Written by Yahoo! Web developer Stoyan Stefanov, Beginning Object-Oriented JavaScript will teach users to solve web development problems using smart JavaScript. Ajax Magazine readers can download the sample chapter (PDF 872Ko) to have an idea on what the book is all about. For years, JavaScript has been a handy hacker's tool for adding interactive elements to web pages, now…

Catalyst Resources released a "green audit" of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaborative workspace project that allows distributed business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. The AJAX Rich Internet Application (RIA) enabled Catalyst Resources to reduce its carbon impact footprint by 21,000 lbs of CO2 per month, while simultaneously reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%. Since 2002 Catalyst Resources has evolved and enhanced their secure online collaboration, project management and document sharing solution for use by remote…

Ruben Daniels have written two interesting articles about outlining new functionality of Javeline PlatForm. With the release of version 0.98.2, PlatForm has enhanced backbutton support. In combination with state objects it implements backbutton support by encoding all state data in the hash. The second article on Docking Windows in the browser - the kind of new feature that you won't see anywhere else. It allows you to create UI's similar to Aptana or Visual Studio, with windows that can be docked, undocked etc.

For more gaming fun with JavaScript, BeSlimed is a very interesting Mootools implementation of BeJewelled game - my favorite game on my mobile ! Now you can enjoy it on browser too.

Synopsis: As the amount of logic implemented in javascript increases in response to demands in accessibility and client-side functionality, the opportunity for foot-shooting has increased exponentially. JDA is a nimble, kevlar-booted javascript message-passing kernel which manages communication between separate javascript modules and enforces that modularization. JDA stands for Javascript Dataflow Architecture. It is an open standard developed by MAYA Design Inc. Benefits of ModularizationOne would think that the Object Oriented revolution would have resulted in a sufficient modularization of…

Introduction. Whether we use Ajax or not, if it is a very long running process the browser may show a time-out error. In case of ASP.NET AJAX if we use a script manager then we also have to define the time-out for the request which can be difficult in the scenario where we cannot predict how long a process will take to execute.In this article we will discuss about this issue and how to use Ajax to handle long running process by using IAsyncResult and ICallbackEventHandler. Web applications are based on a client-server architecture, so when the client hits the server the server will reply. If…

In the development of Ajax application many times we will encounter following issues. The requiremnt to update multiple text boxes simultaneously. Fill more that one dropdown list. Update a combination of text boxes, dropdown lists and div tags. Call different web pages and different webservices at the same time. Imagine the case of a financial data site (such as a stock market info site) with various regions of the page used for displaying data any taking user inputs. We may want to populate fill numerous div tags, textboxes and dropdown lists with real time data. If we loop the several…

In my previous article of Ajax enabled grid using ICallbackEventHandler I outline the creation of a grid with the following operations Sort the grid in ascending or in descending order by clicking on the arrows next to a column name. Change pages of the grid. Change page length of the grid. In this article we will discuss editing the grid with the principal goal of doubleclicking on a grid cell to enable editing of that cell then edit the content of the cell and finally update server side data without refreshing the page. The key advantages of this grid are as follows Data will be bind to…

Metaprogramming JavaScript

DimpleSoftware is a leading vendor of ASP.NET components, offering high quality software products and services. Let clients can accelerate .net development. Upload file onto your website including AJAX Progressbar using KUpload+. Let’s verify your emails by EmailValidator. Make your site AJAX enabled using KCallback control and also validates multiple input controls using KSingle Required Field Validator.

Sigma visual builder is web based tool for AJAX RIA application UI rapid design and involved scripts programming. Written in pure javascripts(Sigma Linb), Sigma visual builder products great compatibilities with web browsers. With this powerful builder, professional and enterprise developers can develope your web application just like what you do in VB or Delphi. And it also support source highlight and syntax checking. Through its powerful AJAX components library(Sigma Linb), Sigma visual simplify complex and boring UI design, which artists instead of programmers are good at. More than 25…

Sigma visual builder is web based tool for AJAX RIA application UI rapid design and involved scripts programming. Written in pure javascripts(Sigma Linb), Sigma visual builder products great compatibilities with web browsers. Developers can develope your web application just like what you do in VB or Delphi. More than 25 components supported - Design by dragging and dropping - Automatic JavaScript code generation - Flexible layout

Share your business cards, present your company, your job or yourself. Zoom into the map to find business contacts at your area. Everything is live.

Vuzit is a web-based software that changes the document distribution landscape by enabling universal office document viewing, security, auditing, and search that increases revenue by improving overall accessibility and usability. Vuzit allows content publishers to embed documents in their web pages, similar to how YouTube distributes video, thus maintaining consistent branding and site navigation. Document auditing and statistical analysis enables content publishers to analyze the usage of their documents to create new revenue streams and optimize workflow.

Yahoo and Intel have partnered to go into the widget business together and create a web-enabled interactive TV channel populated with picture-in-a-pi2 Vote(s)

About.com JavaScript guru, Stephen Chapman has awarded Stoyan Stefanov's 'Object-Oriented JavaScript' book 4/5 stars in his latest review. Describ1 Vote(s)

Css-faq.com has a good collection of CSS articles which contain many good examples for easy understanding. Novice designers feel the necessity of CSS1 Vote(s)

Two new ways to give your web apps free and secure access to a user's location, without requiring that user to enter it manually. First, there's th1 Vote(s)

News item detailing newly published CakePHP book.1 Vote(s)

OpenAjax Alliance is pleased to announce the start of this year’s interoperability event, the 2008 InteropFest for IDEs and Mashups. The 2008 InteropFest continues until just before AJAXWorld West 2008 (i.e., until just before October 20, 2008). The 2008 InteropFest focuses on two main areas: Ajax IDEs and secure mashups. InteropFest Focus #1: Ajax IDEs Today, Ajax tooling falls short of potential, in large part due to interoperability problems. There are a number of Ajax IDEs today and hundreds of Ajax libraries, but only a small fraction of IDEs work well with only a small fraction of…

The Ajax community ranks vector graphics as top request OpenAjax Alliance has produced a summary report of its browser wishlist initiative at: http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki/Summary_Report By July 13, when the voting closed, this initiative has turned out to be a bigger success than expected. Given the amount of effort required to read and understand the vast web technology landscape, and the relatively limited time and resources available to the OpenAjax Alliance Runtime participants, we were hoping for 50 or so people to vote, which would be meaningful to establish a rough idea of…

We are pleased to announce that one of the leading mobile phone makers, Sony Ericsson, has joined OpenAjax Alliance and will participate in our Mobile Ajax activities. We look forward to their help in advancing Ajax technologies on mobile devices.

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki. The feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. The initiative is now in its final voting phase, and the alliance is…

The Mobile Task Force at OpenAjax Alliance has completed its fast-track exploratory phase into Mobile Device APIs. What we mean by the term “Mobile Device APIs” are JavaScript APIs available within the browser engine to allow HTML+JavaScript applications to access device-resident capabilities such as current location, the phone dialer, the address book, the SMS system, the MMS system, the local email system, battery levels, network connection status, and various other things such that the next generation of Mobile Ajax applications can be delivered to the community, but in the…

When it comes to moving into a new apartment in September, the first thing students should look to is fire safety, say local fire departments.

Trivest Partners today announced that it has acquired ATX Networks, Inc. , a leading designer and manufacturer of equipment for cable operators.

Four men were wounded when shots rang out early Saturday at a house party in Ajax.

Ajax, Ontario - Volkswagen Canada has announced the introduction of its all-new 2009 Routan seven-passenger minivan.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario will hold a media conference Tuesday, August 19 at 10:00 a.m. at the Ajax Community Centre to outline how provincial underfunding and privatization are threatening ...

Have you ever gone to a site, looked at the page and wondered, "how did they do that?" Since we launched our 2008 U.S. Election site I am getting lots of questions about that nifty little "page element" sitting in the center of the page. Everyone wants to know, "how did you guys do that? how did you pack so much valuable and tightly scoped information in such a small amount of space?" Take a look at the page element below, play around with it a little bit and when you are ready, continue reading.If you know how to use Firebug, then you can see that behind each tab (Election News, YouTube,…

Have you ever written an app and wanted to do something simple like center a map on your user's location? Consider a simple little map gadget. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to center that map on your user's home country, state, or city, instead of just arbitrarily centering on San Francisco or Australia?Take a look at our new "API". Actually, it's not really an API, more like a simple object property called google.loader.ClientLocation. After loading any one of our AJAX APIs, the system will attempt to geo-locate the client based on the client's IP address. If we have a valid mapping for the…

Back in March we introduced the Google AJAX Language API, which you can use to incorporate translations from Google Translate into your projects. Lots of people have been excited about this API, including some engineers here at Google. Last Friday we released an iPhone interface for Google Translate built on top of the AJAX Language API. This interface exposes much of the functionality for languages translation in a simple UI for people to use on the go. To learn more, take look at this post on the Google Mobile blog.

What's better than making a drag/drop effect in Javascript that's compatible in all browsers? Not making a drag/drop effect in Javascript that's compatible in all browsers. Save your ninja-code for another day and use the JQuery UI plugin that is now hosted on our AJAX Libraries API! As usual, your users will get a performance boost when you use JQuery UI through our API, so get started by checking out the docs.For those of you still waiting for a MooTools 1.2 update, we apologize for the delay. In fact, we had been waiting to release JQuery UI so we could push it with MooTools 1.2. What…

Since the launch we've seen significant adoption for the AJAX Libraries API. Many developers have let us know that they would love to use our API on their secure sites using HTTPS (such as e-commerce), in fact it is the #1 request on our issue tracker. So as of last Friday, we now support SSL access to the libraries.For those of you waiting for this feature, we apologize for the delay and appreciate your patience. Please keep the feedback coming and know that we see each and every one.Now be on the lookout for new/updated AJAX libraries in our API!

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place. In fact, the results are quite often pretty impressive. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies. Today we are glad to release a icON Stage icon set. The set contains 49 free vector icons including PSD which can be useful for both corporate and personal setting. You can…

Many e-commerce sites these days tend to be loaded down with too much information on their landing pages. The reasoning for cluttered e-commerce sites is simple: the more information you can cram on the page, the more the user will buy. Unfortunately, web buyers are a finicky bunch. Jacob Nielson reports that web users are becoming much more impatient while shopping and browsing online. Instead of spending their time going to a site’s homepage and finding the content by categories or other product recommendations, most shopping is done by quick Google searches. If the user can’t…

Free professional WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time. In this article we present over 30 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects. Please read license disclaimers carefully before using the theme in commercial projects — they can change from…

Being a designer in an environment where most people adhere to a strict path of logic can be challenging. There are few logic-centric people who understand the value design has to a product or service. Instead of beating your head against your desk, do something to get the company on common ground. The Only Orange in the Apple Orchard Think back to the first time you discovered that not everyone holds the same respect for design as a necessary part of business as you do. You were just making your grand entrance into the professional world and, much like a child discovering their own hands and…

By Vailancio Rodrigues and Smashing Editorial Team Photos taken with a camera do not represent a single moment of time. Due to technological constraints these shots stand for some scene over a brief period of time. This time frame depends on the camera’s shutter speed. In motion blur, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion. Motion blur is frequently used to show a sense of speed. You can artificially achieve this effect in a usual scene using cameras with a slow shutter speed. Also Adobe Photoshop can be used for…

Error handling for Webthumb job requests has changed. Requests with bad urls are now silently ignored instead of dropping the entire request at the first error. This will fix problems with bad urls in multi-request submissions. Let me know if you have any concerns.

For anyone using Easythumb I have good news and bad news. The good news is the rate for cached thumbnail delivery has been changed to .05 credits. The bad news is the bug where you weren’t getting charged for cached thumbnail delivery has been fixed. If you get an image that says “out of credits” that means you’ve used up your limit for the month. You can purchase more credits to continue your use.

Webthumb generated its 4 millionth thumbnail on monday The official time was 2008-08-11 11:09:49. I’ve been making good progress on the thumbnail rates lately, this million was a bit faster the last. If you want to help me hit the next million check out the site, if you want to buy 250,000 credits or more send me an email I have bulk rates available. Million Time Days 4 2008-08-11 11:09:49 52 3 2008-06-19 11:13:45 58 2 2008-04-22 15:04:57 84

I just completed my first real fantasy football draft of the season. I think i had a better mock earlier in the day, but I was in 8th position here (out of 12), and had problems executing my plan from that position. Here are my picks for the Evil Pigeons, I think the worst aspect is the bye week overlaps on my rb1-2 and wr1-2 (8) Marion Barber (17) Andre Johnson (32) Chad Johnson (41) Earnest Graham (56) Ben Roethlisberger (65) Laveranues Coles (80) Julius Jones (89) DeAngelo Williams (104) Derrick Mason (113) Anthony Gonzalez (128) Matt Schaub (137) Green Bay (152) Owen Daniels (161) Brandon…

I just completed my first mock draft. I messed up a the running back picks Brian Westbrook and Michael Turner have the same bye week, i also waited too long to get running back 3/4 especially since I foolishly picked up 2 players with suspensions (Steve Smith, Brandon Marshall). The only problem with this is I am playing in 2 different leagues with live drafts (Yahoo and ESPN) and neither really match this setup, in one I would need a WR3 and neither have TE in the flex just WR or R so I would be owned with this roster until week 3 when Steve Smith returns. Here’s what i ended up with…

We’re very happy to announce a new addition to the Prototype bookshelf: core committer Andrew Dupont’s Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us published by Apress. Obviously, Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us covers all you need to know about the latest versions of Prototype and script.aculo.us. But it goes well beyond that. Andrew does an awesome job at setting the context and giving appropriate background information, so much so that you’ll end up knowing not only the how but also the why. In the ruthless world of client-side development, that’s a serious asset! Practical…

Prototype Core is happy to announce the first Prototype Developer Day! The Prototype Developer Day is going to be a recurring event bringing together Prototype Core members and users from the Prototype community to share experiences, offer insight into what’s coming up, and discuss topics like contribution, support, and the Prototype ecosystem. If you’re big on Prototype, you cannot miss this! This fall, the Prototype Developer Day is being held in conjunction with The Ajax Experience, held in Boston from Monday, September 29 to Wednesday, October 1 2008. The Prototype Developer Day…

Subscribers to the Rails Spinoffs mailing list should switch to our new, better-named list: Prototype & script.aculo.us. While these two venerable libraries are, in truth, spinoffs of the Rails project, we’ve come to realize it’s far more user-friendly to have the libraries’ names in the name of the mailing list. This should help guide users to the right spot and reduce the amount of support traffic on the Prototype Core mailing list — which is for discussion of Prototype’s development process, not support. Because list spam is a sad reality, your first post to the list will be…

Today’s interviewee is Ryan Johnson of Control Suite fame. Ryan just launched PersonalGrid, a new file sharing and publishing web application, along with a complete overhaul of Control Suite, now renamed LivePipe UI. Hi, Ryan. Could you please introduce yourself. Ryan Johnson: I’ve been writing web pages since 1993, but I’ve only felt comfortable calling myself a programmer for the last 5 years. I drank the Prototype kool-aid about 2 and a half years ago, and I’d say today nearly 75% of all the code I write is JavaScript. I enjoy writing Ruby just as much, but fewer and fewer people…

Piotr Dachtera is the lead developer behind the recently-launched Live Chess, a Prototype-based, Comet-powered live chess game. We talked to him about the client-side challenges he faced along the way. Hi, Piotr. Could you please introduce yourself? Piotr Dachtera: Sure. I’m currently the lead developer of the JavaScript/Ajax/Comet part of chess.com. I’ve been dedicated to Web + chess applications since 1999. I’ve also been working on business software since 2000 (mainly Java). My interest in the game of chess was always pushing me forward and finally I think I can say I’m working on…

Registration for jQuery Conference 2008 is officially open. Register now to ensure your spot! As announced, this one-day conference will be held in Boston on Sunday, September 28, and will feature two tracks of presentations (beginner and advanced) from jQuery project members and a few special guest speakers. A registration fee of $50 will help cover the cost of the venue, as well as food, beverages, and T-shirts for all attendees. We’re finalizing a convenient venue, especially for those who will be attending The Ajax Experience conference the following Monday through Wednesday.

About 4 days ago, many have noticed that we had uploaded another minor bugfix release to our Google Code account. While there’s, again, no new API introduced, more than 30 issues have been cleared and the codebase is growing more stable every day. The full changelog is available here if you want to find out if a specific issue has been addressed. As with 1.5.1, updating to this version is highly recommended and likely not to break anything in your written code. You can grab the latest release as always via the downloader or as developer package at http://ui.jquery.com/download or if you…

Soon after the release of jQuery UI 1.5, we were getting many useful feedback and issues entered in our bugtracker. Today, we’re happy to release another version of jQuery UI which takes care of many minor regressions and a lot of unsolved issues. 1.5.1 doesn’t add any new features or API changes, but fixes more than 50 found issues. A full changelog is available, if you want to know the specifics. Updating to this version is highly recommended and likely not to break anything in your written code. Additionally, issues within ThemeRoller and the demos on our homepage also have…

The jQuery Team is pleased to announce the second annual jQuery Camp! jQuery Camp 2008 will be held on Sunday, Sept. 28, the day before The Ajax Experience, in Boston, MA (location TBA). Last year, over 100 jQuery developers gathered for a full day of jQuery sessions, which included talks from such big names as jQuery creator John Resig and other core team members, as well as talks from expert users exploring new and exciting jQuery projects. It brought together the largest group of jQuery Core Team members ever assembled, and gave users the opportunity to pick their brains and pitch new…

We recently discovered an issue with the download builder which caused it to serve cached 1.5rc1 files instead of the final package. We sincerely apologize for the inconvienience caused by this and strongly suggest to download jQuery UI 1.5 again if you downloaded it as a configured package. Additionally, an issue has been found in ThemeRoller that causes the downloaded images to be default images in most cases. The issue was fixed now, and we also suggest you to try out downloading your theme again. jQuery UI 1.5: Rethinking Our Approach to UI When we first started with the UI project, we…

Ext GWT 1.1 is right around the corner and incorporates the popular Portal and Web Desktop interface. Both components offer new ways to layout your prospective application in different ways. Web deskop resembles a user operating stystem, while portals offer a means to aggregate seperate modules and content.

Marketo was an early adopter of Ext, and has steadily been expanding and improving their marketing automation application over time. With a new version rolling out that has been converted from the ground up to use Ext 2.0, Marketo is looking better than ever. We spoke with the team to learn more about their app and how they are using Ext.

We are pleased to announce the release of Ext 2.2, a fully backwards-compatible maintenance release of Ext. This is a recommended upgrade for all Ext 2.x users as it not only adds many new components and examples, but also provides a host of important bug fixes and performance improvements.

We love to see all the different types of applications developed using Ext. SingleHop has developed LEAP, a server management application that gives the end user significant power over administering their remote servers via the web. I recently spoke with Dan Ushman, a co-founder of SingleHop, to get the scoop on LEAP and find out more about how they used Ext.

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.

Earlier this month, we released a preview of the next generation of YUI — YUI 3.x. We’ve already gotten a lot of valuable feedback from members of the YUI 3.x community forum; thanks to everyone who’s downloaded the preview and started evaluating the new APIs. Next week, we’d like to invite you over for beer and snacks here at Yahoo! to meet with YUI’s developers and talk about the goals and strategies intrinsic to the project. The setting will be small and informal — no slides, just some code demos and some discussion about the project. If you can make it,…

Just recently I published a new pattern, Sign-in Continuity, to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. It could be filed under “Engagement,” a category we have internally but that hasn’t appeared yet here, but I decided to put it in the “Social” category instead. The pattern is about making sure that a user’s momentum isn’t robbed when they want to participate in a community and have to be challenged for their login credentials in order to sign their contribution. The crux of the pattern is to preserve context and make sure the user is inconvenienced as…

John Peloquin, a developer for W. Hardy Interactive, Inc., graciously contributed a new YUI Calendar implementation called IntervalCalendar that we’ve incorporated into the basic YUI Calendar example set. The IntervalCalendar class, defined in this example, allows users to select pairs of dates representing the start and end of a date interval. Applications which require interval selection, for example a hotel check-in/check-out date selector, frequently display separate calendar instances to select the beginning and ending dates of the interval. The IntervalCalendar provides an…

It’s been a busy July and August for the YUI team, working on a preview release of YUI’s next-generation 3.x codeline and ramping up for the next release in the 2.x codeline — a release in which we’re focusing on bringing DataTable and RTE out of beta, adding a new Carousel Control (based on Bill Scott’s popular YUI-based Carousel), and more. In the meantime, there’s been a lot of YUI news out there… Satyam’s YUI Progress Bar: YUI superhero Satyam has a new Progress Bar implementation built on YUI. To know Satyam is to know that this thing is…

YUI 3.0 Preview Release 1 was made available on Wednesday, and with it we provided a look at how the next major iteration of YUI is taking shape. Among the elements we shipped with the preview is a new example from Dav Glass, the Draggable Portal, which exercises a broad cross section of the preview’s contents. The Draggable Portal is a common design pattern in which content modules on the page can be repositioned, minimized, removed, and re-added to the page. The state of the modules persists in the background, so a reload of the page or a return to the page calls up the modules in…

Dojo 1.2 will sport a nice API standardization for widgets. Widget.attr() is now the standard interface for setting/getting all widget attributes. For example: // set title myTitlePane.attr('title', 'hello world'); // find out if button is disabled var dis = myButton.attr('disabled'); // set to the current date myDateTextBox.attr('value', new Date()); It also supports a hash API like dojo.attr(), for setting multiple attributes: myInput.attr({ tabIndex: 3, disabled: true, value: 'hi'}); Notes for widget developers: The first thing to think about as a widget developer is that all the…

Hi dojoers, I am sure you got question what the heck is Dojo Furniture! Is Dojo changing its profession from javascript framework to furniture wholesaler? Well allow me to explain about it! Since my project proposal, I promised to give many things from code library, documentation and couple tests but *hrmmmm* something missing... then I purposed to have real world example in the list... Then there you go! I called it Dojo Furniture! Fine, Dojo Furniture is your "real world" example... Then what it does? Is it like other furniture website? Of course big no from me... It is completely different…

In addition to improving the text-splitting process, I created text versions of all but the last two "split" effects. To make up for the two effects I'm leaving out of the text effects, I came up with two new text effects. The first one (which is already pretty much complete) is a simple typewriter effect. It is not as customizable as the others, but is more tailored to achieve expected results. The other will be much more complicated. Each character will spin through many different characters until finally being "decoded." For this effect, I'll have to create a new Animation class from…

Last week I added an unprecedented enhancement to the Dojo Object Harness (DOH) unit test framework, called doh.robot, scheduled to appear in Dojo 1.2. This enhancement adds an API to DOH that enables testers to automate their UI tests using real, cross-platform, system-level input events. In this post, I'm going to explain the enormous value-add of this enhancement in terms of unit and accessibility testing, and how to get started using this new API. The challenge of Web UI testing Web UI testing frameworks like Selenium and Windmill already contain browser automation elements suitable for…

Today, Alex Russell closed the voting on the unanimous selection of a new Dojo Project Lead: me. It is with great pleasure that I write this brief note announcing the change, and look forward to serving the Dojo Toolkit and it's developers, users, and contributors. Both Alex and I have both posted some notes about the change. Thanks to everyone for their vote of confidence, and to Alex, who has dutifully served in this position for the past four years. Here's to dojo.greatness() ... Join me for a virtual celebration, and have yourself a dojo.beer()

A lot of folks ask questions about how to use controller’s in SproutCore.  Well, now you have some answers.  Thanks to rollerdexter who wrote up the majority of this article.

On August 31 I am getting married to my college sweetheart and taking a month-long honeymoon that will last until early October.  Because of this we’ll be running “reduced service” in the SproutCore project in a few ways: No Bay Area SproutCore meetup is planned for August or September.  We will resume in October, unless someone else wants to pick up the effort to arrange a meetup during this time.  Feel free to email us at contact@sproutit.com if you are interested. No new releases of the SproutCore gem are planned until October. If an emergency release is required,…

John Resig announced some very good news about the future of JavaScript yesterday.  The technical team at ECMA - TC39 - responsible for writing the spec for the next version of JavaScript (called variously ES4 or ES3.1) had effectively split in two, hindering any real progress towards producing a real spec.  The result was that the group finally decided to jettison some of the ideas both camps had adopted and coalesce around a more evolutionary approach to JavaScript. Despite whatever conflict might have caused this, the outcome is undoubtedly good for JavaScript developers everywhere.

Serving up static files is about as easy as it gets when trying to manage your server. That is one of the awesome advantages of using SproutCore in your deployed applications. However, working with these static apps in development can do some funny things with your cookies. If you have run across any of these issues including having to authenticate every time you refresh then you will want to take a look at this by Mike Subelsky. Warning: if you add any code to force authentication be sure it won’t carry into production!

Just a quick note that we released a version 0.9.16 of SproutCore today.  This fixes a critical regression introduced in 0.9.15 that broke use of the :field option.  The sample controls have also been updated to make sure we test for this in the future. Otherwise 0.9.16 is the same as 0.9.15

We're happy to say that the first Release Candidates for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit are now ready to be taken for a test drive. The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java language bindings and API specific plumbing for some Google JavaScript APIs. The goal is to make it easy for developers to use these JavaScript APIs with GWT. Libraries available at this time include a new version of Gears, as well as new libraries for Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API. Gears 1.1 Library (Release Candidate) A new version of the Gears library is available. In addition…

The second release candidate of GWT 1.5 is available for download now. Thanks to everyone who started using GWT 1.5 RC1 and shared feedback. With your help, we're very near the end of the big GWT 1.5 development cycle. If you haven't already, now would be a great time to start upgrading your project to take advantage of all the new features and great performance gains in GWT 1.5. Enjoy!

Suppose you're happily using JSNI to call bits of handwritten JavaScript from within your GWT module. It works well, but JSNI only works at the level of individual methods. Some integration scenarios require you to more deeply intertwine JavaScript and Java objects — DOM and JSON programming are two good examples — and so what we really want is a way to interact directly with JavaScript objects from our Java source code. In other words, we want JavaScript objects that look like Java objects when we're coding. GWT 1.5 introduces JavaScript overlay types to make it easy to integrate…

Google has recently launched Google Health, a place where you can organize health information, keep it up to date and stay current with the latest health issues. We're happy to say that Google Health was built with the Google Web Toolkit, and pleased to have Samantha Lemonnier from the Health team share her experience using GWT. Google Health started to pick up speed around the time I first joined Google. A few of us had whipped up a prototype in our 20% time. GWT naturally came into the picture as we tried to decide what we would use to build our client infrastructure: hand-written…

The next and hopefully last release candidate for GWT 1.5 is almost upon us. In anticipation, we'd like to really crank up the excitement level and, well, the sheer geek factor of this here blog. If you are new to GWT, you may be wondering what all the excitement is about. Why is GWT different from other framework-style solutions? GWT is more of a tool chain and a baseline technology rather than a particular application framework. So, although GWT has lots of libraries, you can use as many or as few as you find useful. Don't like GWT's UI? You can build your own using the DOM classes. Want to…

Aptana can be configured to catch one of the most common Javascript programming errors: the dreaded “dangling comma”, an extra comma left trailing after the last property in an object literal. This problem can be fiendishly difficult to spot, particularly if you have a complex, nested arrangement of object literals. Aptana can point you at these bugs right there in your source editor. To set this up, go to the Window menu and select Preferences, then navigate to Aptana -> Editors -> Javascript -> Validation. Your screen now looks like this: Ensure that the “JSLint…

Yes, it’s true! A project has been underway for some time to create a GWT (Google Web Toolkit) wrapper for SmartClient. The project, dubbed SmartGWT, will be made available under the same LPGLv3 license as SmartClient LGPL, with commercial licensing available as well. It will be hosted on Google Code with public SVN access, and external committers will be welcome to participate as with SmartClient LGPL. We are happy to say that Sanjiv Jivan, the creator of another popular GWT wrapper, is involved in the development of SmartGWT. Sanjiv brings expertise in precisely the right areas, and…

We’re happy to say that our blog has now been included on the Alltop Ajax. If you’re not familiar with it, Alltop groups RSS feeds for sites by category and then lists the five latest postings for each site.  They have many different categories for topics from Ajax to food to iPhones.  You can roll over headlines to get more text of the news item.  You can visit the Ajax Alltop here.   A helpful tip, if you think there are too many feeds, you can click on the “x” to hide some.

We’re pleased to announce a beta release of the SmartClient plugin for Aptana Studio. Among other features, this plugin provides code auto-completion for SmartClient APIs, boosting your efficiency and making it easier to learn and discover SmartClient’s rather vast functionality. Eclipse fans, take note: Aptana can be installed as an Eclipse plugin, so this will slot right into your existing environment. Update If you’re having any trouble getting this working, a couple of tips: If you’re not seeing the “SmartClient 6.5.1″ entries in either Global References or…

In his blog “The Clever Monkey“, Curl’s VP of Developer Relations, Richard Monson-Haefel, writes about a new feature coming in IE8, stunningly, citing new Ajax features in IE as signs of the “End of Ajax”. Richard does not seem to be aware that the XMLHttpRequest API - sometimes called the “X” in Ajax - was a Microsoft proprietary extension first. It is now an international standard present in all major browsers. Proprietary innovations that have value get copied and become standards.   It is precisely this kind of innovation - innovation by…