All posts by : Ajaxian Blog

1 of 286 | 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 styling, and numerous usability tweaks. Working with databases and web services has become a lot simpler. Forms are generated automatically, and applications can be setup to save data with just a few clicks. A new REST service importer expands WaveMaker's already stellar support for web services. Developers can also create Java ......

2 of 286 | 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 Observer pattern with custom events I have started to play with a pet project also involving custom events. I love keyboard shortcuts. I hate the mouse. I wish that Web applications would offer more keyboard shortcuts a la Gmail, and wondered if there could be a generic way to tie keys to actions in an app. There are things such as accessKey, but we need more. If you start to follow the pattern of creating ......

3 of 286 | 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 of that every created object is a DOM object so you can attach JavScript event handlers or modify objects later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing cross-browser and easy. Currently library supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. The API looks like this: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   // Creates......

4 of 286 | 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 are the ugly standard browser input controls, now replaced by attractive, visually-consistent Ext-ified versions (a long-overdue improvement). In addition to that, we’ve added group controls for both that support complex layouts with just a config option or two. Previously in order to accomplish similar grouping layouts you would have h......

5 of 286 | 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 with APIs for message headers, redirects, content and types. Speaking of types… for the first time with Jaxer, you can return content types other than HTML including JSON, XML, GIF, etc… Yes, even GIFs. Jaxer has a fresh new Image API that among other things can convert Canvas to static images and serve them up. Like, Greg, I too really like the idea of using Jax......

6 of 286 | 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, and a JavaScript component which makes Ajax requests to configured server-side component and caches the results. How do you call it? PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   (function(){         YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady(function(){                   var container = YAHOO.util.Dom.get("container");                                 YAHOO.EDF.Thumbn......

7 of 286 | 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 new dojox.io.windowName module, and it is very easy to make web services available through the window.name protocol. window.name works by loading a cross-domain HTML file in an iframe. The HTML file then sets its window.name to the string content that should be delivered to the requester. The requester can then retrieve the window.name val......

8 of 286 | 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 ordinary table Ability to connect to an ajax data source (XML and JSON[new]) Paging Show/hide columns Toolbar Search Accessible API Version 1.0b3, which was recently released provides: Fixed paging problem on multiple instances Mootools and Prototype noConflict() compatibility problems fixed N......

9 of 286 | 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:   class="user" data-name="John Resig" data-city="Boston"      data-lang="js" data-food="Bacon">   John says: Hello, how are you?   Which you can get at via some simple code: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var user = document.getElementsByTagName("li")[0]; var pos = 0, span = user.getElementsByTagName("span")[0];   var phrases = [   {name: "city", prefix: "I am from "},   {name: "food"......

10 of 286 | 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: tab tab tab tab tab tab bonk. Web 1.00001: The beginning of the rich web experience: the first ever, primitive Javascript code fragment is written. It generates an unwanted popup, and snaffles your credit card details. Web 1.1: No visible difference from Web 1.0, apart from IE showing the text 'Javascript error' in its status bar. Web 1.2: Standard buttons are upgraded with smart......

11 of 286 | Silverlight 2 beta 2: cross domain connections, more controls, and animation - Microsoft launched Silverlight 2 beta 2 last Friday (which seemed a bit strange….). I saw this on the same day as some Adobe folks showed me an old thread that showed MLB.tv sneaking a context menu saying “About Silverlight” into the Flash version ;) What is new in the latest beta? Danny Thorpe is looking forward to digging into the “new support for cross-domain connections using sockets, sibling to Silverlight’s existing cross-domain HTTP request.” Full Feature List Animation Support for animating custom data points Object Animation support (animating structs) Deep Zoom New XML-based file format MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom......

12 of 286 | Google Analytics after onLoad and document.write for XHTML - I saw two articles that were both looking at similar issues. Firstly, Pete Higgins has looked at the fact that Google Analytics is normally loaded via serial script tags which cause the rest of the application to wait and created a simple wrapper that changes things. We have all seen the tell tale: "waiting for google-analytics.com ... ". This is usually before the body tag is closed, which causes [at least] Dojo's addOnLoad() function to wait until after ga.js has been loaded, and executed. I notice it most on the SitePen Dojo QuickStart guide. The whole guide is sent as valid HTML and CSS, then enhanced to break major sections into a custom tabbed view, with simple navigation. Unfor......

13 of 286 | Javascript HTML Construction Benchmark - “innerHTML is 35 times faster than DOM.” “DOM methods are just as fast!” This is a constant argument, and statistics hardly help ;) Laurens Holst of Backbase has taken a detailed look at the issue as he drew up his own benchmark. People keep mentioning performance as an argument for using innerHTML, citing that article, so I thought I’d go and see what the reason was for the difference between his and my findings. It turns out that the benchmark has some flaws that skew the results very much in favour of innerHTML, which I’ll point out. Content is never escaped Selective HTML usage XML is much faster than HTML He re-ran the benchmarks on his system using the new browsers and ......

14 of 286 | Mozilla Experiments with Applying SVG Effects to HTML - It seems so obvious once you think about it, but Rob O'Callahan from Mozilla took us by surprise in his blog post demonstrating his experimental branch of Gecko that allows you to apply SVG effects to HTML. The code for applying the effects above follows: PLAIN TEXT XML:   xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"       xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> style="background:#ccc; font-size:30px;">   >     p { width:300px; border:1px solid black; display:inline-block; margin:1em; }     iframe { width:300px; height:300px; border:none; }     b { outline:1px dotted blue; }   >   class="target" style="background:lime;">     Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, co......

15 of 286 | Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime - Nexaweb has released a new product that build on Dojo, dojo.E: dojo.E provides developers with the ability to use an XML based markup language to add in their Ajax behaviors. Markup whether — XML, HTML or CSS — simplifies development by allow developers to convey in simple text format what they would otherwise need to convey in code. Markup also provides a great abstraction layer that separates the implementation from the usage. This release, which is an Apache style open source project itself, consists of two pieces: dojo.E Markup dojo.E Markup allows developers to describe their dojo components using a simple markup language that translates directly into dojo classes. For example ......

16 of 286 | crossdomain.xml, Java, and JNLP - Joshua Marinacci has detailed how Java SE 6 update 10 supports the same crossdomain.xml that Flash supports, and how you can marry it with JNLP to allow you to do Applet mashups without permission dialogs. The applet security model, known as the sandbox, only lets applets connect to the webserver they were loaded from. They cannot connect to anywhere else unless they are signed. Signing is great when you need access to more than what is allowed inside the sandbox, but it has two problems: the user will receive an ugly warning dialog about the applet, and the applet will have full access to the user's computer. Full access is overkill when all you want to do is talk to a webservice on ano......

17 of 286 | Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0 - The folks at Y!DN have released Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0, which contains a full set of stencils that cover Web components in various states including: Ad Units Calendars Carousels Charts and Tables UI Controls Form Elements Grids Menus and Buttons Mobile - General Mobile - iPhone Navigation and Pagination OS Elements Placeholder Text Screen Resolutions Tabs Windows and Containers Whip out Omnigraffle or your tool of choice and get going :) You can download the artifacts in various formats: OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), PDF, PNG, SVG. ...

18 of 286 | HTML 5 and a different kind of ruby support - Anne van Kesteren gave an XTech presentation on HTML 5 and boiled it down to this: The Web’s language is HTML The Web’s application language is HTML too HTML is pretty broken HTML5 to the rescue Defines processing for all of HTML Is for Web applications and documents Is defined in as an abstract language Can be written in both HTML (HTML5) and XML (XHTML5) Is a multi-vendor effort Worked on by overlapping groups: WHATWG and W3C HTML WG HTML5 is (partially) implemented today HTML5 can be used today Great Community! (Wikis, tools, tests, reviewing) , , , , … , , … Immediate mode graphics: and SQL storage, offline application cache, drag & drop, editing, … Get involved:......

19 of 286 | Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Writing Your First YUI Application - Eric Miraglia has posted a great tutorial on how to build your first YUI application. He runs you through the steps of creating a simple application that leverages YUI’s AutoComplete Control to create a site-search form powered by the Yahoo!’s Search web service. The tutorial is a great walkthrough of both how to build the application and also leverage YUI’s extensive documentation. It also touches on some great points such as: How to configure a YUI implementation and put YUI on the page How to set up the markup for a progressively-enhanced YUI widget How to instantiate and configure a YUI widget How to subscribe to and make use of the “custom evens” provided by a YUI widget An......

20 of 286 | Persevere: JSON Storage / Application Server - Kris Zyp of Sitepen has released Persevere: An open source set of tools for persistence and distributed computing using intuitive standards-based JSON interfaces of HTTP REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and HTTP Channels. The core of the Persevere project is the Persevere Server. The Persevere server includes a Persevere JavaScript client, but the standards-based interface is intended to be used with any framework or client. The Persevere Server is an object storage engine and application server (running on Java/Rhino) that provides persistent data storage of dynamic JSON data in an interactive server side JavaScript environment. It is currently in beta, and boasts a very solid feature set t......

21 of 286 | OpenKM: Open Source Document Management - OpenKM is a multi-platform application for document management based on GWT, JBoss, and Jackrabbit (the content repository API). Version 2.0 has been released, which you can test drive to see the application-style interface. The new features in 2.0 include: the previsualization of multimedia elements as images and videos, an improved an rewritten administration interface, a centralized management of templates, an exclusive area to allow users to store their private documentation, a tool for massive import and output data from ZIP files, searches by date ranks as well as translations to more languages. However, one of the more relevant functions to mention is the indexing of the most com......

22 of 286 | HTML Parser in JavaScript - John must have had some downtime on Sunday afternoon, as he implemented an HTML parser in JavaScript. The library, that you can play with via this demo, lets you attack HTML in a few ways: A SAX-style API Handles tag, text, and comments with callbacks. For example, let's say you wanted to implement a simple HTML to XML serialization scheme - you could do so using the following: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var results = " ";   HTMLParser("hello world", {   start: function( tag, attrs, unary ) {     results += " + tag;       for ( var i = 0; i length; i++ )       results += " " + attrs[i].name + '="' + attrs[i].escaped + '"';       results += (unary ? "/"......

23 of 286 | Now your mobile phones get to take some Acid - Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, co-chair of the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group at the W3C, has published a test in the spirit of the ACID tests: Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers: That test, in the same spirit as the ACID tests, combines in a single page tests for 12 Web technologies, ranging from well-deployed (but often poorly implemented on mobile devices) technologies such as HTTPS and PNG, to technologies we believe will matter in a year or two (like SVG animation and CSS Media Queries). Tests are visualized by squares, sorted roughly in order of difficulty (first line, well-deployed technologies, second line, technologies increasingly used today, third line, technologies......

24 of 286 | JSONVid: Pure JavaScript Video Player - Jacob Seidelin went on a ( crazy :) ) mission to create a pure JavaScript video player that didn't use Flash: My first thought was to read binary video files using a technique like the Andy Na posted about here, figuring that there must be some really simple to parse video formats around, but I soon changed directions and decided to make up a whole new video format. Enter.. JSONVid. Using a player like mplayer, it is easy to export all frames in a movie clip to individual jpeg files, and using whichever language you prefer it is also fairly trivial to collect these files, base64 encode the bunch of them and throw them all together in a nice JSON file (I used this PHP script). The forma......

25 of 286 | Dojo XHR Plugins; How do you want your XHR today? - Neil Roberts goes into the XHR Plugins that Dojo uses and how you can extend the system to have your own. If you look at dojo.xhrGet you will see "Acceptable values are: text (default), json, json-comment-optional, json-comment-filtered, javascript, xml", but: What you may not know is that the handleAs parameter is merely a way of specifying what plugin to use. Knowing where these plugins are, how they work, and how they can be adapted to suit your project will allow you to make repetitive tasks easy and less error-prone. He starts by piggybacking on the json style callback, and adds a hook so when you do a query, if there are updated objects out there, they come back in the JSON so y......

26 of 286 | Mozilla Fennec: The mobile browser wars - IE may be the dominant browser on the desktop, but the mobile wars are going strong. WebKit, Opera, and Pocket IE have a lot of users, but Mozilla has been a little weak in the past. Now though, they have a new Fennec browser that takes the great performance gains in Firefox 3, and makes a mobile oriented version. Sullivan explained that the Fennec project aims to bring the desktop Firefox user experience to handheld devices but will focus on meeting the unique requirements of mobile computing users. "Our goal on mobile is to embody the principles that have made Firefox so successful on the desktop, but with the recognition that mobile is different—not so much in that it presents some......

27 of 286 | Web Archeology: Java Pluglet API - I started a new series of posts on Web Archeology where I look back at old Web tech to maybe divine some inspiration from the future. I am re-posting from my original blog Even since Ben and I looked at the notes for the first version of Mozilla that supported XMLHttpRequest, which suddenly took the technology from “Some ActiveX for IE” to “Ajax”, I have been interested in hidden technologies that maybe never made it. In those notes for that release we saw no mention of XMLHttpRelease, but technology such as FIXptr was prominently mentioned. Also, something interesting about Ajax is exactly the fact that the technology was available since 1997, but didn’t make it big until many more Di......

28 of 286 | JavaScript SAX Based Parser - Gregory Reimer fancies SAX, and wished that a SAX parser was given to us by the JavaScript host environment. You can't blame him for not living DOM, but how about E4X? Or, StAX? Anyway, Gregory decided to build a SAX based parser in JavaScript itself, using simple search and replace: After reading Search and Don't Replace over at John Resig's blog, it got me wondering if you could use that technique as the basis for a SAX parser in JavaScript. Of course there's nothing stopping you from building a SAX parser from scratch in JavaScript, but (methinks) the string tokenizer part of it would be a bit of a beast. However, by taking advantage of the optimization built into JavaScript's RegExp ......

29 of 286 | Spket IDE 1.6.11 Released - The team at Spket Studio continues to enhance their Eclipse-based Spket IDE announcing today the release of Spket IDE 1.6.11. The updates include: A Theme Builder for the Ext JS framework (screenshot, tutorials) Code assist for JavaScript improvements (references) Code assist support JavaScript keywords and documention view for JavaScript editor (references) Preferences for color of matching brackets (references) Bugs: code assist for XML closing tag was fixed. Bugs: Insert code snippets affect more than one editor was fixed. Spket IDE 1.6.11 is immediately available for download. ...

30 of 286 | qGallery: Prototype gallery application - Sebastian Brink has developed a nice looking gallery application called qGallery It is really simple to use you just have to upload your images in full resolution together with a simple xml file and include the script and a simple div into the webpage. Everything else is done automatically. The gallery is creating every used image on the fly with the help of some php scripts in the background. It is developed on top of Prototype and a bunch of other libraries. ...

31 of 286 | What does the “Open Web” actually mean? - Many of us use the term “Open Web”, yet what does this actually mean. There isn’t a Wikipedia entry on it yet. When you start to think about it, you may be surprised to find out how hard it is to pin down. It is HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS? Brad Neuberg argues that they are just technologies that right now happen to implement the core philosophies behind it in his opinion piece What’s the Open Web and Why Is It Important? Decentralization - Rather than controlled by one entity or centralized, the web is decentralized — anyone can create a web site or web service. Browsers can work with millions of entities, rather than tying into one location. It’s not the Google or Microsoft Web, b......

32 of 286 | Ajaxian Roundup for March, 2008: IE 8, Acid3, and Performance - As we sit through the fun and frolics of April fools day on the Internet, we can look back on a busy March in Ajax land. Often life is dominated by Ajax libraries, as they continue to make our lives easier, but this time it was about the browsers and the standards. With IE 8 we finally saw a dusting off of a browser that has been largely out of the game for many years. After poking around more with activities and Web slices, they actually seem interesting indeed, but we really care about the non-user facing stuff. We want IE 8 to catch up and give us our APIs. The first public beta is promising, and now we need to watch for the next. Safari 3.1 was released, and Firefox 3 is looking close,......

33 of 286 | Comet Roundup: Gazing, Battles, and Protocols - There has beern a lot of great Comet content recently, especially from Comet Daily of course :) First, they gazed at their own Comets talking about maturity, together with a maturity grid. Since the project leads and vendors are grading themselves, you have to do due diligence :) Joe Walker has written up 3 styles of API that are relevant when considering Comet services, which are: Traditional API Style. This API is the most obvious. If you want to set the text of a button, you call field.setValue(43.5) or something similar. It’s possible to imagine complex APIs like the SWT library made available remotely. This type of API does not need Comet, unless the trigger for wanting to alter ......

34 of 286 | FaviconGrabber and Social Graph - Alistair Rutherford has written a nice looking Flex application that visualizes the Social Graph API: Alistair told us about the application, and some of the fun features: The initial version was a bit boring looking so I thought it would be nice to pull the ‘favicons’ for the sites returned in the results. I have detailed how I did this here Because I could not fetch the icons directly using HTTPService I have used a cgi proxy script written in Python to fetch the target icons and convert them into a Base64 encoded string before returning the data to the Flex application. The Flex application decodes the Base64 and then passes the data to a modifed version of the IconLoader class f......

35 of 286 | SMD: Pluggable Web Services - PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   {target:"/jsonrpc", // this defines the URL to connect for the services  transport:"POST", // We will use POST as the transport  envelope:"JSON-RPC-1.2", // We will use JSON-RPC  SMDVersion:"2.0",  services: {    add : { // define a service to add two numbers    parameters: [      {name:"a",type:"number"}, // define the two parameters      {name:"b",type:"number"}],    returns:{"type":"number"}  },  foo : {   // nothing is required to be defined, all definitions are optional.    //This service has nothing defined so it can take any parameters   //and return any value  },  getNews : {    // we can redefine th......

36 of 286 | Appcelerator: RIA + SOA - Appcelerator is a fairly new open source toolkit on the block that is trying to be an Open Web RIA to compete with Flex and co. with high profile folks such as Marc Fleury as advisors. Nolan Wright, CTO, has written a piece for syscon entitled The Next Web Development Episode Is RIA + SOA. In the article Nolan talks about Appcelerator and how it fits into his world view: 1. Design the "look" of the application This is the general appearance of an application. It includes things like: color, fonts, graphics, and a general page layout. Common toolsets: HTML, CSS and images 2. Integrate Widgets Widgets encapsulate a set of common capabilities within a single component. They typica......

37 of 286 | Internal IE-HTML DOM still isn’t XHTML compliant - Jon Davis was glad to see that XHTML compliance was on the list in IE 8, but was surprised to see the above. It turns out that he found: XHTML compliance exists in parsing and rendering only. Microsoft is still using an internal IE-HTML DOM that is not XHTML-compliant, even in XHTML documents. All you have to do prove this out is, in script, alert(document.documentElement.outerHTML); and what do you see? The most obvious observation is a total disregard for XHTML 1.0 § 4.2, which reads, “Element and attribute names must be in lower case; XHTML documents must use lower case for all HTML element and attribute names. This difference is necessary because XML is case-sensitive e.g. and ar......

38 of 286 | CouchDB: Using E4X to get the XML back - Christopher Lenz has been spending time on the CouchDB project. He got lulled over when CouchDB went to JSON. He talks about how "CouchDB is pretty well positioned for storing and querying XML data in addition to JSON" via the E4X support that it gets out of the box as it uses SpiderMonkey. PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: by_lang: function(doc) {   var html = new XML(doc.content);   map(html.@lang, {title: html.head.title.text(), …}); }   To be fair, this is already possible if you use other view servers (such as the Ruby or Python ones), where you also have access to the XML support provided by the respective standard libraries. Given CouchDB’s incremental view update model, you usually......

39 of 286 | Me.dium shows off new IE 8 features - Me.dium, the social browsing folks, have put together some examples using the new Activities and Web Slices features. You can install their Activity if you have IE 8, or you can take a look below: As part of Activities, Me.dium now offers a powerful “Social Discovery” Activity from any page. Me.dium’s “Discover” Activity gives you recommendations, related to a page or selected key words, which are influenced by the real time surfing activity of all Me.dium users. Me.dium also displays a “real-time map” of user activity on the pages related to the selected text, page, or link so users can see how popular those pages are with Me.dium users in real time. This is their XML file. PLAIN ......

40 of 286 | The FireEagle has landed - personal location information for your applications - Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and - even more importantly - developing applications for it. This is FireEagle: Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user’s location? Or, maybe you......

41 of 286 | Silverlight Offline and AIR - A couple of articles from the press came out at the same time. Darryl Taft reported on his conversation with Kevin Lynch and Martin LaMonica published Microsoft to take Silverlight offline eventually. The intersection is where Kevin answers about Silverlight going offline: Well, what about an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it? In order to do it well, your heart has to be in it. And if you look at what we're doing right now with our technologies like Flash and AIR, we're making sure they work reliably across operating systems. So that means Mac and Windows, but also Linux. We're releasing Flash Player now simultaneous for Mac and Windows. It took us a while to get their a......

42 of 286 | WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio 3.1.1 Released - WaveMaker has just released a new version of its open source Visual Ajax Studio v3.1.1. It is similar to TIBCO GI, but built on top of Dojo with JavaScript output that is very terse and even looks like something you may have written (which is rare indeed for a tool). Studio lets users create database- and web service-driven Ajax web applications using a wysiwyg visual designer. WaveMaker helps users create simple applications without any scripting knowledge, while developers can easily add Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Java code to create complex application behavior. Studio is a web-based application that leverages the Dojo Toolkit to create pages containing widgets and Dojo Dijits. Users......

43 of 286 | Kevin Hakman joins Aptana - When we posted the last podcast on Aptana Jaxer, someone commented on the fact that Kevin Hakman was there, and "Doesn’t Kevin Hakman work for Tibco? What does he have to do with Aptana?". Aptana has now come out with the news that they have hired Kevin: We are excited to announce that Kevin Hakman has joined Aptana to head up marketing and developer community programs. Kevin is a recognized leader in the Ajax community. Long before the term "Ajax" was coined, Kevin was pioneering single page web application concepts via the company he co-founded, General Interface Corp., one of the first enterprise Ajax libraries and visual development tools companies. General Interface Corp. went on......

44 of 286 | ECMAScript 4 Milestone 2 Released - ECMAScript 4 M2 has been released and Francis Cheng has posted about the new version. M2 fully implements: classes and interfaces namespaces pragmas let, const, let-const iterators enumerability control type expressions / definitions / annotations runtime type checks (”standard mode”) nullability destructuring assignment slice syntax hashcode catchalls map & vector date & time improvements meta objects static generics string trim typeof globals expression closures name objects type operators (is / to / cast / wrap) Francis also posted about Vectors: A new built-in class named Vector is proposed ......

45 of 286 | OnionML: Server Side JavaScript Layout Engine - Marcello Bastéa-Forte has developed OnionML, a layout template language that uses server side JavaScript with Rhino and E4X on the back end. The high-level goal of the template engine is to be something with utility not unlike CSS, but for intended layout and composition. The actual functionality is similar to XSLT, but with the design goal of being simple and easily extensible. Onion ML is an XML template system designed with a bias toward modularity. Onion ML lets