All posts by : Ajaxian Blog

1 of 338 | Xopus Application Framework: Objective-J Done Different - The good folks at Xopus (the really cool browser-based XML editor) have been working largely in silence on a new version of their application. They've recently posted a presentation that talks about the framework behind this new version of Xopus. In the linked PDF, the framework is revealed to be an "object-oriented 'extended subset' of JavaScript", much like Objective-J, but while Objective-J brings a syntax very similar to an existing language (Objective-C), the Xopus framework brings its own syntax to the game: PLAIN TEXT JavaScript:   Package("com.xopus.code" );   Import("com.xopus.code.Food" ); Extends("com.xopus.code.Animal" );   Class(     function Monkey (name)......

2 of 338 | Facing up to fonts - Richard Rutter of Clearleft has a nice presentation up on facing up to fonts that goes into nice detail on the world of typography and the Web. First he takes some time discussing fonts and various choices out there. Did you know about the various numbered font weights out there? From 100 to 900. Well, on Firefox 3 and WebKit. And there is font-stretch which no one supports. Then we have the EOT versus Open/TrueType wars: @font-face { font-family: "Fontin Sans"; src: url("http://server1.com/FontinSansR.otf"); } @font-face { font-family: "Fontin Sans"; src: url("http://server2.com/FontinSansR.eot"); } Richard is also a fan of the idea of Fonts as a Web Service where trusted t......

3 of 338 | JsonML: Who needs angle brackets? - JsonML swaps out the world of the curly with that of the angle. The purpose of JsonML is to provide a compact format for transporting XML-based data via JSON. Simon Willison says it best: An almost non-lossy serialization format for sending XML as JSON (plain text in between elements is ignored). Uses the (element-name, attribute-dictionary, list-of-children) tuple format, which sadly means many common cases end up taking more bytes than the original XML. Still an improvement on serializations that behave differently when a list of children has only one item in it. Have you seen this path before? Hating on XML and going for JSON, but then trying to JSON as XML and at the end of it you j......

4 of 338 | CP2JavaWS: GWT like Cappuccino to Java remote services bridge - Jerome Denanot has created CP2JavaWS, an open source "bridge between Cappuccino rich desktop applications and Java services deployed on a web server. It consists of a proxy (client side) and a servlet (server side), and manages parameters namespace, encoding, ordering and JSONP." Jerome told us more: Full objects graphs are supported for services method's arguments and return (see provided example in the distribution), including nested collections (List and Map) and heterogeneous collection elements. Its use is as easy as with GWT (and does not require any generation step thanks to the Objective-J runtime - interpreter step at runtime). Usage On the client-side: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: ......

5 of 338 | Kiva: Making a difference with a new API - We don’t often post about general APIs. I let John Musser handle that on Programmable Web, but this one strikes a chord with me. Kiva, the distributed micro loan platform, has released a new developer API that gives third parties access to create innovative applications on top of the platform: The initial release of the Kiva API is concerned with helping you find and present public data from Kiva. We want to help you find things like loans, lenders, and partners and help you represent those in your applications and products. We think there are a lot of really useful things that can be done just by helping the Kiva community find information in different ways or experience it in a new con......

6 of 338 | JSINQ: LINQ style access for JavaScript objects - PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   from customer in $0 group customer by customer.lastname into g select {lastname: g.getKey(), count: g.count()} into r orderby r.count descending select r   The code above should look similar to LINQ in .NET and runs with JSINQ a framework created by Kai Jäger. With JSINQ, you can write SQL-like queries (or LINQ-like if you will) against arrays, DOM node lists or your own enumerable types. It's a complete implementation of LINQ in that it has the complete set of LINQ extension methods and also comes with a query compiler that translates LINQ queries to JavaScript code. Not only do you have a query language in JavaScript, but also a lot more. Fo......

7 of 338 | RockstarApps’ Web Optimization plugins for Eclipse and Aptana - Bob Buffone has some interesting performance plugins for Eclipse and Aptana, so I asked him to tell us a little about them. He came up with this: This week RockstarApps released a beta version of jsLex 1.2. The goal of project is to “codify” all the research that has been done in Web Optimization by people like Steve Souders and his 13+ Web Optimization Techniques, plus others. Making it possible for everyone to create highly optimized Web application with little or no impact on the how developers build and test their applications. “If your Website is getting an “F” in YSlow! using the software you can change it into an “B” or better in a manner of minutes.” (Sounds like an infomercial, if......

8 of 338 | BitTorrent in the Browser - Opera does it. Others talk about it. Robert Accettura posts about how he thinks we should implement BitTorrent in the browser. He doesn't want a X-Torrent HTTP header as we can use Accept-Encoding for the same goal. How would it work? Assume my browser supports the BitTorrent protocol and I visit the following URL for a download: http://dl.robert.accettura.com/pub/myfile.tar.gz My request would look something like this: Get: /pub/myfile.tar.gz Host: dl.robert.accettura.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5 Accept: */* Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,torrent Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=......

9 of 338 | Parse User Agent: Harder than you thought? - Steve Souders likes to look at user agents in the morning. For his UA Profiler he has to parse the user agents coming in to put the results in the correct bucket. He assumed that there would be libraries that did this well, but wasn’t able to find anything reliable. In his post he talks about how he decided to build a web service to do this himself, available as Parse User Agent. When you go to it you see results like above, and note the difference between its results and those from User Agent String.com. Steve on the new tool: You can paste any User-Agent string and see how my code classifies it. I also show the results from UserAgentString.com for comparison. The next steps, if there’s ......

10 of 338 | MooTools Update: Milk, MooBugger, JavaScript techniques, and more - There has been a lot of interesting news in the MooTools community recently. Before it passes us by, I wanted to aggregate some of the goodies for your perusal: MooBugger Valerio and I spent a few weeks a while back putting together a bookmarklet that would give you a Firebug-style JavaScript console for browsers without Firebug (IE, Safari, etc). It supports console.log statements in the various formats that Firebug supports (”console.log(’foo: %s, bar: %o’, foo, bar);”) and is really useful for debugging your code in non-Firebug browsers. I like to use it in conjunction with X-RAY to solve layout issues, too. To use it, all you need to do is drag the link on the bookmarklet page into your......

11 of 338 | Technical Details Behind iWork.com - As soon as I heard about the new iWork.com site launched yesterday, I knew I wanted to know more about how it was made. iWork.com is a web-based way to share and collaborate over your iWork documents. I searched around the blogosphere seeing if anyone knew any technical details, but didn't find anything, so I had to crack open Firebug and see what was under the covers. I really wanted to know whether the apps were built with Flash or Ajax or something else. I downloaded a trial version of iWork 2009 and published a Keynote presentation. The new Sharing function unfortunately requires you to configure and use the Apple Mail program, which I did before I could test out to see how the iWork.co......

12 of 338 | More Ajax Experience Videos: JSON and JavaScript - Following-up from our previous posting, we've got some more Ajax Experience videos. This post's theme is JavaScript and JSON: Advanced Animation & Physics in JavaScript with Paul Bakaus Forget about Web standards and go way beyond the usual capabilities of Web scripting languages. Learn how to create stunning effects using canvas/svg/vml, how to control animated graphics in JavaScript, and how to merge all kinds of standards and technologies to create a whole new world of possibilities. Using Paul's latest project as an example, he shows you how to adapt the things he talks about into new projects, featuring his new JavaScript game engine. Paul demonstrates how to control animated graphics ......

13 of 338 | Special Offer for Ajaxian Readers: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Hello Ajaxians! We’re inviting all of the Java developers out there to an event organized by our sister site, TheServerSide.com, the Web’s largest enterprise Java community. As a member of Ajaxian, you save an extra $100 off the registration fee with the code AJAXIAN. (Register before January 16 to save a total of $400 and get a free book!) TheServerSide Java Symposium explores current and emerging trends in enterprise Java and how they apply to your daily work. Choose from over 45 technical sessions on new technologies, best practices and practical tips from some of the brightest minds in the industry, including Rod Johnson, Neal Ford, Scott Davis and 35 Java experts. Tracks include Framew......

14 of 338 | Why Load Testing Ajax is Hard - Today we are fortunate to have a guest post by Patrick Lightbody, most recently of BrowserMob fame (and previously Selenium work, OpenQA, WebWork, and more). Let’s listen in to him talk to us about load testing, and let him know your thoughts in the comments below: I’ve been developing and testing complex web apps for a long time. I was the co-creator of WebWork (now Struts 2.0) and an early champion of DWR, writing one of the first AJAX form validation frameworks for Java web apps. But over the years, I noticed that as our web technologies and techniques got more sophisticated, our testing techniques were not keeping up. That was why I founded OpenQA and helped grow Selenium to......

15 of 338 | Kaazing Gateway 8.12 Battlestar Available - Kaazing keeps on moving with its Java Comet server, and just released a new version. It will be interesting to see if real-time connections take off in 2009. Kaazing is happy to announce the second major release of its Kaazing Gateway, an open source HTML 5 web server, which includes support for HTML 5 WebSockets. With the 8.12 release of Kaazing Gateway delivers even more HTML 5 features such as Server-sent Events, more advanced security services, and extended support for XMPP (Jabber) and STOMP (e.g. ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, or OpenMQ). Server-sent events make a substantial contribution to the HTML 5 specification; however, Kaazing Gateway makes that contribution even greater by enabling Broa......

16 of 338 | Lengthening Out URLs - In our age of information and technology, there isn’t as much mystery as there used to be. In that sense, short URLs (e.g., tinyurl.com/123) can be fun! Who knows where you’ll wind up. Some folks aren’t as happy with uncertainty in hyperlinking; one of them, Darragh Curran, wrote in to tell us about his project: Long URL Please. Long URL please (http://www.longurlplease.com) is a JSON webservice to efficiently convert short urls (tinyurl.com/123) to their originals. I’ve got a simple jquery plugin to take advantage of it, and a firefox plugin. It’s running on google app engine. Darragh hates short URLs so much he’s offering to contribute his time to help wipe them off the face of the web......

17 of 338 | YQL - converting the web to JSON with mock SQL - I like getting data from the web and I love JSON - as it is easy to use. The issue is that not many things on the web come as JSON from the get-go. Hence we need converters. You can use cURL and beautiful soup or roll your own hell of regular expressions. Alternatively you can use Yahoo Pipes to build your converter. Pipes is the bomb but a lot of people complained that there is no version control and that you need to use the very graphical interface to get to your data (which was the point of Pipes but let's not go there). AlasRejoice for there is a solution now available and it is called YQL. YQL is a SQL-style language to get information from all kind of web services, and - using oAuth......

18 of 338 | SmartMarkUp: Universal Markup Editor - Joseph Woods of PHPCow sent us a note about SmartMarkUP, a “universal markup editor”: SmartMarkUP is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript library that allows you to turn any textarea into a fancy markup editor. HTML, CSS, XML, Wiki syntax, BBCode or any other desired markup language can be implemented and/or adjusted to your preferences and business needs. SmartMarkUP doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript library and can be integrated with any already existing JavaScript library or code. Although SmartMarkUP is stand-alone, they’ve created a jQuery plug-in wrapper for it. The documentation is quite extensive and includes detailed notes on how to use the editor to edit your own markup. ......

19 of 338 | Appcelerator Titanium: Breathing AIR for the Open Web - The Appcelerator folks have a big announcement today. They are announcing an early release of Appcelerator Titanium which is easiest if you think of it as an "Open Web version of Adobe AIR" in that it is a runtime that has extended APIs that allows developers to create applications using Web technology. It is built glueing and moulding WebKit, Chromium, and Gears in very interesting ways indeed. A lot of tough work was done in getting the glue to bind to graphics toolkits on various platforms, and then the work to tear apart Gears and allow it to take in new modules which implement APIs such as: Native windowing (transparent custom chrome) Direct file system access Database integration and......

20 of 338 | Massively parallel crowd sourced JavaScript app server; SETI for JS - Malte Ubl is having a lot of fun here :) He has created a "massively parallel crowd-sourced JavaScript app server cloud" a.k.a. SETI for running JavaScript code. This is how it works: When a user makes a request to the site ...the request is handled by a Google App Engine application ...that puts the request into a request queue Meanwhile on another computer that runs the JavaScript app server within a Gears worker within the browser ...a comet-client maintains a pseudo permanent connection to the App Engine app ...looks into the request queue and starts to process the request ...when it is finished it sends the response to the App Engine app ...which immediately send the request back to ......

21 of 338 | pyQuery: Same API, but with a snake. - jQuery came first, but then we have seen others such as pQuery. Now we have pyQuery which brings the same great taste API to Python. The author Olivier Lauzanne explains: yquery allows you to make jquery queries on xml documents. The API is as much as possible the similar to jquery. pyquery uses lxml for fast xml and html manipulation. This is not (or at least not yet) a library to produce or interact with javascript code. I just liked the jquery API and I missed it in python so I told myself "Hey let's make jquery in python". This is the result. It can be used for many purposes, one idea that I might try in the future is to use it for templating with pure http templates that you modify us......

22 of 338 | SmartGWT 1.0: Huge open source widget set and more - You may remember Sanjiv Jivan as the GWT-Ext developer that changed over the debacle. He then went on to start work on a GWT version of SmartClient libraries and has now released SmartGWT 1.0. It is a tour de force of not only a huge widget library, but he explains how it is much more: So what’s so smart about SmartGWT? Let me try to explain. SmartGWT is not just another Widget library. While most Ajax frameworks focus primarily on presentation and displaying mostly read-only data, either local or via XML / JSON, SmartClient was built with server side integration in mind. Most enterprise applications are not just about about data presentation, but about being able to propagate data changes......

23 of 338 | keyboardr.com: quicksilver in a web page - Julius Eckert has renamed and relaunched chosr to keyboardr. keyboardr is a homepage. It speeds up your internet experience. And if you like, it helps you keeping your hands on the keyboard. In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling of “searching” with the feeling of “launching”. For the future we have big plans for keyboardr: keyboardr will utilize much more webservices. Among from usual websearch services like google, we are planning to support friendfeed, delicious, twitter, flickr, google docs and many more. And in the final stage, we will have an extension syste......

24 of 338 | Meer Meer: Cross browser testing all through your one browser! - The most exciting part of Adobe MAX last week was a service that was announced by Paul Gubbay at the “Sneaks” session that shows cool tech that Adobe folk are working on. His (very early stage) service is called Meer Meer and it is genuinely useful. You can plugin a URL and the system will render that page on a server farm (many browsers, cross OS) and show you the results. It can visually layer these results so you can see the differences. It was awesome. I pinged Paul and had a nice conversation with him about the project: Can you explain what Meer Meer is, and where you got the inspiration? Meer Meer is the code name for a new hosted service that allows Web Pros to view their content on......

25 of 338 | Firebug tricks, Dojo style - Tom Trenka has a nice posting on Dojo and Firebug Tricks for Development where he shares two of his own: Trick #1: using window.location.search to enable Firebug Lite on the fly With the Dojo Toolkit, I find this trick indispensable. The basic concept is to use the original version of the djConfig variable—the object-based one—using a boolean to enable or disable debugging. In a single line of code, here’s the trick: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var djConfig = { isDebug: (window.location.search.indexOf("debug")>-1) };   Trick #2: setting up a simple HTML file that just enables the console Once you drop in the simple HTML file below, you can bookmark it, load up your Dojo world, and......

26 of 338 | yboss - a wrapper for Yahoo’s BOSS API - BOSS - Build Your Own Search Service (the your is silent for reasons I cannot tell you as it would endanger the lives of our agents in the field) is a Yahoo! API to access their search index and get the data back either as XML or JSON. Whilst there is ample documentation available it can still be a bit daunting to use the API purely in JavaScript - especially when you want to have several asynchronous calls - for example when you want to search the images, news and web sites for a certain query. I've had several complaints of Hackers at the Open Hack Day in Brazil about this and wanted to make their lives easier by writing a wrapper for the API. This wrapper is yboss and it was a big succe......

27 of 338 | Groups of 50+ Ajax Examples - Noupe keeps the roundups going with Most Wanted Ajax Techniques: 50+ Examples and Tutorials that consists of a lot of projects we have covered over time, but some new ones, and the added touch of putting it together in one place. Ajax Forms Server side jQuery with Jaxer Ajax login form (PHP & Javascript) Form Plugin ShoutBox wTag (Ajax shoutbox) Shoutbox Ajax Validate a Username AJAX Validate a username using Javascript and PHP ( AJAX ) Ajax Instant Messenger Ajax Instant Messenger Ajax and XML: Ajax for chat Ajax Tabs Content Ajax Tabs Content AjaxControlToolkit TabContainer Ajax Shopping Carts Drag and drop shopping cart Ajax Star Ratings Starbox Unobtrusive Ajax Star Ratin......

28 of 338 | Aptana Jaxer 1.0 released, brings together the Aptana trinity - Paul Colton of Aptana has announced the Jaxer 1.0 release. This comes on the heels of the general availability of Aptana Cloud, and of course their Studio product that ties things together. First, Jaxer 1.0: If you’ve already been using Jaxer you’re likely familiar with its database, file system and socket APIs and its ability to not only run JavaScript and process the HTML DOM at the server, but also to expose server-side functions to the Web such that a HTML page can call back to those functions directly from the Web page. Thus Ajax communications could not be any easier with Jaxer: You just write a server-side function, “proxy it” with one line of code, then call it from the Web browse......

29 of 338 | Widgetplus: Server side Ajax widgets - Mikael Bergkvist has created Widgetplus, a gadget platform. He told us about it. XML Runtime The structure of an application is defined in XML. It’s loaded into the serverside runtime like this: javascript:xin.app(' http://www.naltabyte.se/desktop/xin/demo/programs/basics.xml '); We get this as a result. (the ‘test this’ link) Changes to the app remain persistent because on the server, the xml object has changed. Of course, different users gets different versions of the same widget, because they have their own xml runtimes. A widget can contain any amount of javascript to execute clientside, and also include any css to style it, like this calendar application. A widget can also split itse......

30 of 338 | Web Sockets, Comet, and a Panel - Comet is starting to gain steam, although mainly through the term “real-time Web.” A couple of the Comet folks posted at the same time, both talking about the technology in different ways. Ted Goddard answered a bunch of questions in WebSocket is neither Web nor Socket. Does WebSocket use TCP ports 81 and 815? How does WebSocket make use of an HTTP connection on port 80? Does WebSocket obey the same origin policy? Is WebSocket restricted to the two-connection limit of HTTP? Can WebSocket read and write arbitrarily as with low-level socket APIs? How does WebSocket delineate messages? How are function call semantics implemented over WebSocket? Is WebSocket easy to implement? Can we just upgr......

31 of 338 | A Patent On…. The SCRIPT tag - I just stumbled across an interesting/scary patent (via JSONet). It looks like someone has tried to patent using the SCRIPT tag to invoke web services: The present invention permits a JavaScript-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) to be executed from a Web page displayed in a Web browser window, without utilizing browser plug-in, Java Applet, or ActiveX technology. Traditionally, clunky downloads and Web browser plug-ins has been required to enable Web page interactivity, which greatly compromises the performance and reach of the Web page. Based purely on HTML and JavaScript, the present invention utilizes the HTML SCRIPT element to pass data to the server and execute a remote procedure, rece......

32 of 338 | OpenAjax Alliance Announcements - The OpenAjax Alliance, an organization that has been working to promote more standardization among JavaScript toolkits and IDEs, held an InteropFest last week at the AJAXWorld conference. The OpenAjax Alliance has been focusing on two things: Ajax Developer Tools - The group has been working on creating a standard XML file format called OpenAjax Metadata. The goal of this is to have a file format that can describe all of the JavaScript APIs and widgets in an Ajax toolkit, making it easier for IDEs to just read this file in to do nifty things like autocompletion and code hinting. Ajax Mashups - The group has been working on producing two technologies to make Ajax mashups easier. The first i......

33 of 338 | A Peek Inside the W3C - I've long believed that the Ajax/JavaScript communities and the W3C should communicate more and have more awareness of what both camps are doing so we can work together better and get things done. In light of this, here are some updates on a special W3C meeting that is taking place right now. From October 20th until the 25th the W3C is meeting at something called the TPAC: TPAC stands for Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee. It's a unique moment in the year where people involved in W3C communities meet, discuss, argue, fight and make peace, have good food and sweat on tough issues. It's usually a very interesting week, which helps to remove a lot of misunderstandings built during one y......

34 of 338 | Blast from the Web Past: DirectAnimation, Microsoft Chrome, and Cartoon Chat - Awhile back Dion kicked off a series of posts looking at past technologies on the web, web archaeology if you will. Sometimes its good to know where we've come from to figure out where we are going. In this spirit I want to talk about a few web technologies from the past. Before there was Silverlight, there was DirectAnimation starting in Internet Explorer 4: ...DirectAnimation offers the only solution of its kind in the industry, with features that include the following: • Consistent interface for dealing with 2-D vector graphics and sprites, 3-D geometry, text, video and audio media types. • Versatile run time with a breadth of multimedia playback services that are easily incorporate......

35 of 338 | Standards Suck: View More Info - Anne van Kesteren, Marcos Caceres, and Lachlan Hunt talk about Web standards on their show which is interestingly titled "Standards Suck" (since they are active participants on making them suck less!). They recently published some interesting interviews, including: Alex Mogilevsky of Microsoft on CSS and IE 8 I interviewed Alex Mogilevsky here in Mandelieu during TPAC on CSS and the new Internet Explorer. Alex is a developer on the IE Team working on the new IE8 layout engine. He also participates in the W3C CSS Working Group. Charles McCathieNeville of Opera on W3C Web Apps and more Marcos Caceres interviewed Anne’s manager on Web Apps, being a chair, and RDF & HTML5. Charles McCathieN......

36 of 338 | Firefox 3 and XML - I’ve been delving back into the gnarly world of XML on the web lately and surprised to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. Coming up to speed on what’s new in this part of the Ajaxian world, I found a great article from IBM DeveloperWorks on what Firefox 3 brings to the table with XML. Some highlights: “Firefox 3 introduces one huge improvement to basic XML parsing. In the past on Mozilla browsers, parsing an XML document was synchronous, blocking all operations on the document until it was fully loaded…To the user, this meant he starts to see how a Web page shaped up before the browser had completely processed the page; on the other hand, with XML documents......

37 of 338 | Firefox 3.1 beta: Geolocation, @font-face, Video and Audio, XHR++, and TraceMonkey - Isn't it great that a browser point release these days adds so many features? We are starting to see this from Firefox, Opera, WebKit and others, and it is exciting! The Firefox 3.1 beta 1 release has a slew of features that developers have been craving: Geolocation The labs team got Geode out there, and quickly we have seen the addition of the W3C Geolocation API added to the Firefox core. I can test Where Are You with a native implementation. @font-face WebKit lead with their @font-face implementation, and getting browser #2 to support it is huge. Now you can load up a font using same-origin rules via simple CSS: PLAIN TEXT CSS:   @font-face {   font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif......

38 of 338 | IE8 and Standards - Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software has updated his post on IE 8 to cover beta 2: XDomainRequest: Microsoft unfortunately continues with XDomainRequest rather than making changes to XMLHttpRequest as other browsers are doing and as is being standardized by the W3C Web Apps Working Group. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of XMLHttpRequest Level 2.) Some agreement was made to at least support the same protocol on the server, namely using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header as per Access Control for Cross-Site Requests. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of that draft too.) However, IE8 only supports * as value for that header, not an origin, e.g. http://annevankesteren.nl (test). Sunava pointe......

39 of 338 | The myths and reality of XHTML - Lack of support for XHTML is a fact of life on the web in 2008. Prior to the 3.0 series of Firefox the XHTML processor in Gecko was so poor that Mozilla’s own engineers recommended against it[27]; no version of Internet Explorer up to, and including, IE 8 support XHTML at all, and a number of other browsers such as Lynx were never written to handle XML in the first place. The above quote comes from XHTML?—?myths and reality by Tina Holmboe, a member of the XHTML Working Group. It is a nice piece that delves into: Introduction The Purpose of XHTML XHTML and the Content Type Strictly XHTML Lack of support Content–Negotiation Recommendations ...

40 of 338 | IE 8 beta 2 Ajax features - Sunava Dutta has detailed the enhancements made to IE 8 beta 2 for Ajax developers including XDR, XDM/postMessage, DOM Storage, offline detection, and more. A lot of great stuff! XDomainRequest (XDR) This is an object built from the ground up to make client-side cross-domain calls secure and easy. To reduce the chances of inadvertent cross domain access, this object requires an explicit acknowledgement for allowing cross domain calls from the client script and the server. Additionally, it reduces the need for sites having to resort to the dangerous practice of merge scripting from third parties directly into the mashup page. This practice is dangerous because it provides third parties ful......

41 of 338 | navigator.geolocation now available in Firefox via Geode - When I posted about using navigator.geolocation now the only support that I had was via Gears and the ClientLocation API. I wrote the shim to try to get you the W3C API no matter what, and today we have the first implementation in a browser, via Geode. Geode is the latest project in Mozilla Labs that gives you that API in Firefox. Aza Raskin has a nice Food Finder application that ties it together with local search and maps. Differences between Geode and Geolocation in Firefox 3.1 Geode and the Geolocation Services in Firefox 3.1 will use the same W3C API for Geolocation, meaning that the same Javascript code will work in both. The still-in-developement Firefox 3.1 version will allow the ......

42 of 338 | SMIL 3.0 Reaches Proposed Recommendation - Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (or SMIL) 3.0 has now become a proposed recommendation at the W3C. SMIL hasn’t been widely used, but some of it is widely supported thanks to ACID tests that had the browser vendors put it in. 3.0 has the following goals: Define an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL, an author may describe the temporal behaviour of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen. Allow reusing of SMIL syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, in particular those who need to represent timing and sync......

43 of 338 | HTML Whitelist: Sanitize your markup - HTML Whitelist is the latest in the "cool little Python Web service thrown up on App Engine" by my good colleague DeWitt Clinton. It does one thing, and it does it well. You can pass the service HTML and it will return a sanitized version. For example: PLAIN TEXT HTML:   // original The quick brown fox src="http://evil.com"> jumps over/kbd> the lazy dog.   // converted too The quick brown fox <script src="http://evil.com"> jumps over/kbd> the lazy dog.   There are a bunch of options. You can pass in HTML, pass a URL to the content, using JSON and JSONP, and different encoding options. ...

44 of 338 | input type=camera to give us a simple way to integrate to Webcams - There are a substantial number of iPhone apps that tie into the builtin native components such as the camera. Brad Lassey has been hacking on Fennec (the Mozilla mobile browser) as well as Firefox itself to integrate with camera phones and Webcams alike: I wrapped a video tag, image and a few buttons in xbl and bound it to . When a user hits a website using this tag, he or she currently will see a live video preview and a “take photo” button. When the user clicks the button, the photo is grabbed from the camera and shown to the user in the image element. The image element and video element are in a deck element so only one is shown at a time. After the photo is taken, there is a button th......

45 of 338 | input type=camera to give us a simple way to integrate to Webcams - There are a substantial number of iPhone apps that tie into the builtin native components such as the camera. Brad Lassey has been hacking on Fennec (the Mozilla mobile browser) as well as Firefox itself to integrate with camera phones and Webcams alike: I wrapped a video tag, image and a few buttons in xbl and bound it to . When a user hits a website using this tag, he or she currently will see a live video preview and a “take photo” button. When the user clicks the button, the photo is grabbed from the camera and shown to the user in the image element. The image element and video element are in a deck element so only one is shown at a time. After the photo is taken, there is a button th......

46 of 338 | Audible Ajax Episode 30: Interview with Kris Zyp - Dealing with data is one of those areas of software development that we haven’t quite gotten right yet; anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something (or has developed an open-source framework). Whether you embed SQL in your code, map objects to data via some kind of tool, mash it all up LINQ-style, or go all sci-fi with funky XML-all-the-way-down tools, each approach has a series of trade-offs and compromises that just don’t feel right. Kris Zip, a researcher with SitePen, is throwing his hat into the ring with efforts he and others at SitePen are leading to provide Ajax developers with a fully coherent JSON stack. That is, frameworks and services that allow developers to deal entire......

47 of 338 | PhoneGap: “AIR for the iPhone” - Dave Johnson calls PhoneGap "AIR for the iPhone" because this nice little hack, first created at an iPhone BarCamp, wraps the Web view with a container. This container gives the view access to APIs available on the device, that may not be available yet via WebKit alone. AIR provides a similar container for Flash and Ajax content on the desktop. PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, ......

48 of 338 | Dojo Toolkit 1.2 RC1 is Out! - The Dojo team has put out the much anticipated release candidate for the Dojo Toolkit 1.2. Lots of work has gone into this with new updates and features galore added to this release: 1000+ changes, improvements, and bug fixes since the 1.1.1 release Huge improvements to Dijit include .attr() for getting and setting all attributes, and performance and polish improvements across all widgets The new and greatly improved Dojo Grid, with full dojo.data integration Enhancements to charting including tooltips, animations, events, legends, and several new chart types doh.robot, providing unit testing integration with Selenium and Windmill New features including but not limited to: multi-file uplo......

49 of 338 | Simon Willison, @Media Ajax - Simon Willison is talking about Ajax vulnerabilities at @media Ajax. The main thing to worry about is users injecting Javascript - cross-site scripting (XSS). Other vulerabilities people used to talk about - trusting user input and checking for SQL injection attacks - are boring/easy. If I have an XSS hole, I can steal your users’ cookies and log in as them, show a fake phishing page, embed malware, etc. And any service your site provides, I can perform it as if I was one of your users. Reflected XSS - I embed my JS in a link to your site and trick your user to follow it. Persistent XSS - I get my XSS onto your site’s database (e.g. by adding it to a forum). Examples of XSS from facebook, ......

50 of 338 | Zend Framework 1.6: Dojo, SOAP, Testing, Tooling, and more - Andi Gutmans announced Zend Framework 1.6 which includes the new Dojo support which they put to work on the site itself: With this release we continue to provide enterprise-grade features with our new Zend_Soap component, which brings PHP-style simplicity to building and exposing SOAP web services. This component can operate in both WSDL and non-WSDL mode and makes creating or consuming a SOAP service a snap. Preview of Tooling Project: Zend_Tool is a component currently under development in the Zend Framework library. It provides services for generating and managing ZF-based projects. We are offering a preview release along with ZF 1.6 to collect feedback from users in a variety of env......