All posts by : Ajaxian Blog

51 of 317 | 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......

52 of 317 | 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......

53 of 317 | 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 ? "/"......

54 of 317 | 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......

55 of 317 | 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......

56 of 317 | 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......

57 of 317 | 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......

58 of 317 | 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......

59 of 317 | 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 ......

60 of 317 | 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. ...

61 of 317 | 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. ...

62 of 317 | 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......

63 of 317 | 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,......

64 of 317 | 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 ......

65 of 317 | 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......

66 of 317 | 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......

67 of 317 | 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......

68 of 317 | 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......

69 of 317 | 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......

70 of 317 | 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 ......

71 of 317 | 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......

72 of 317 | 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......

73 of 317 | 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......

74 of 317 | 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......

75 of 317 | 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 ......

76 of 317 | 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 you easily custom XML tags to make modular content design simple and easy to mix with HTML. It is somewhat comparable to XSLT and JSF, but intended to be easier to understand. You define custom tags either as markup in XM......

77 of 317 | AjaxDataControls v1.0 Ajax Extensison for .Net - We’ve been trying to get more .Net-related content on Ajaxian and luckily we were contacted by the AjaxDataControls team about their new v1.0 release. The AjaxDataControls is a DotNetSlackers.com’s open source project built on top of Microsoft Asp.net Ajax Extension. Currently it contains GridView, DataList, Repeater and Pager controls. The main goal of this project is to provide a similar kind of data controls in the client side which the asp.net developers are already familiar with while working with the server side version. The Server side versions of these controls were developed long before the Ajax came into scene, so there is no client side API which the developer can utilize and i......

78 of 317 | OpenAjax Alliance Launches Its Second Wave - The 100+ members of OpenAjax Alliance recently approved the release of OpenAjax Hub 1.0, including the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification, an open source reference implementation at SourceForge, and a complete test suite. OpenAjax Hub 1.0 is a small JavaScript library ( The alliance’s second-generation initiatives will focus on secure mashups. OpenAjax Hub 1.1 will add support secure mashups, publish/subscribe across browser frames, and publish/subscribe between clients and servers (including Comet-based communications). A complementary second initiative, OpenAjax Metadata, will define industry standard Ajax library metadata that will be used by Ajax developer tools (i.e., IDEs) and mashup ed......

79 of 317 | MySpace Announces Developer Platform - In an obvious move to counter FaceBook’s expanding developer platform, MySpace, the top trafficked social network announced today the availability of the MySpace Developer Platform. News of the imminent release had been circulating for weeks and MySpace finally gave developers the keys to it’s playground. The MySpace Developer Platform (MDP) allows developers to create applications that interact with MySpace members and their social data. With MDP you will be able to create compelling new products that integrate directly into MySpace pages and get exposure to millions of people around the world. While still in it’s early stages, the sandbox will allow developers to start getting their a......

80 of 317 | Ajaxian Roundup for January, 2008: JavaScript Turtles and IE 8 - January has started the month out in some style. We are seeing a lot of news that shows the Web may actually be moving forward a little. One sign of that is the trickle of news that comes out of Redmond on IE 8. IE8 Compatibility with X-UA-Compatible sparked debate throughout the entire Web community, and when all is said and done, it shows you what happens when you do not have good early communication. Just work with us. Before you ship. Chat with Hixie and get involved in HTML 5 now. JavaScript continues to thrive and move throughout the stack. First we had the news of Aptana Jaxer, which allows you to write your Ajax code and have it run on the server. This even means munging with the ......

81 of 317 | Book: Practical DWR 2 - Frank Zammetti has authored the first book dedicated to DWR, Practical DWR 2 (Amazon). Joe Walker wrote a foreward which he posted, and here is Frank’s personal message: Ajax represents a brave, new(ish) world of web development where coding on the client is just as important as on the server side. Hundreds of libraries exist that purport to make it easier for you, and there’s always the “Do It Yourself” approach. Which route should you take? If you work with Java technologies, one choice that stands out is DWR, or Direct Web Remoting. With DWR, JavaScript-based client code that calls server-side objects works as if it were all running in the same process space. The simplicity and p......

82 of 317 | Library Agnostic LightBox - There are a lot of lightboxes out there. Most use specific libraries such as jQuery, Prototype or MooTools but few, if any, are completely library agnostic. This poses a challenge when you want to incorporate, say, a really cool lightbox from MooTools into a Prototype application. Michael J. I. Jackson (no relation to the singer) wanted to address that and I think he’s done a stellar job with his newly released Shadowbox LightBox component: A few weeks ago, I was looking for a Lightbox-like script that would allow me to display more than just pictures. In addition to static images, my client required the ability to display various types of movies including QuickTime and SWF. The only sc......

83 of 317 | Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+ - Btw, if you want CSS rules to apply to unknown elements in IE, you just have to do document.createElement(elementName). This somehow lets the CSS engine know that elements with that name exist. This was uttered by Sjoerd Visscher innocently on a Sam Ruby thread, and it sent ripples of "huh? really? How come I never know that!" through all of the experts. This fact means that you the following will show up as red in IE 7: PLAIN TEXT HTML:     blah { color: red; } document.createElement("blah") Hello!/blah>   This is an example from John Resig as he discusses a HTML 5 shiv. You can see how a JavaScript shim can "implement" some of HTML......

84 of 317 | ExtTLD: Create Ext components with XML - Jaroslav Benc has created ExtTLD, a JSP taglib generator that creates Ext JS components from your Java projects, using XML syntax: Roadmap Hibernate integration - HibernateStore component DWR integration etc. Eclipse plugin UX Tags: Ext.ux.*, Ext.portal.*, Ext.feedreader.*, Ext.desktop.* How ExtTLD works with ExtJS ExtTLD is using a constructor definition to generate ExtJS code. Every component passes its code to the ancestor’s items attribute or other ( data, tools, buttons etc.). Config options are generated from tag’s attributes, listeners are generated from the attributes starting (”onX”). In case ID is set by user, global object with this ID is created ( Ext.getCmp(”id”))......

85 of 317 | Winter Holiday Christmas Lights - Scott Schiller redesigned his site for the holidays and I somehow missed it. He tends to experiment with JavaScript in this way, and this year is a great example: Move your mouse over the christmas lights (with headphones), and blow off some holiday stress! Smash -all- of the lights, and you will be.. rewarded. ;) This uses SoundManager 2 for the effects, and YUI for DOM, Animation and the Slider widget. The site’s time-sensitive (night/day) and you can control the “lighting” and other effects via a slider, but I’ll leave it for you to check out if interested. ;) I was also pleased to note that the YUI worked nearly flawlessly when the site is rendered in proper XML/standards mode (XHTM......

86 of 317 | Flemish Politics Election Center - We recently posted about the Ajax behind the election coverage on CNN in the states. We then heard from Bruno Braes, a developer who worked on other political Ajax fun over in Flanders, Belgium. This is a touch ironic since Belgium has been running without a new government for how many months now? :) Bruno talked about the project: The main purpose of the website was online publication of election results with preferential votes and statistical information (including man/woman ratio, age category of the elected person, level of participation). The website recorded peaks of 8.45 million hits an hour, 3 million read pages and more than 350,000 unique visitors on October 8th. The automat......

87 of 317 | Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest in Firefox 3 - John Resig has written up documentation of Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest that discusses the W3C Access Control working draft which Firefox 3 implements. He gives us a nice example: In a nutshell, there are two techniques that you can use to achieve your desired cross-site-request result: Specifying a special Access-Control header for your content or including an access-control processing instruction in your XML. In HTML: PLAIN TEXT PHP:   header('Access-Control: allow '); ?> John Resig   In XML: PLAIN TEXT XML:   ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ?access-control allow="*"?> >>John Resig>>   And the XHR code itself isn't different from ......

88 of 317 | Tastebook: Rails Ajax Cookbook App - I was at the PCWorld innovative product awards at CES last night, and ran into Tastebook, a site that allows you to build a personal cookbook from both online and your grandma’s recipes. The site is Rails based, and uses a mixture of JavaScript and Flash to get rich functionality such as a visual representation of the book, a designers, access to Web services, and drag and drop support. ...

89 of 317 | XUL Templates - Mark Finkle has posted about new datasources for XUL templating which links to a nice tutorial. I hope to see more XUL/like features finding their way into the Open Web. Take a look at some of the examples: Using vbox to use fun box model stuff and create a simple vertical box: PLAIN TEXT XML:   datasources="rdf:bookmarks" ref="NC:BookmarksRoot" flex="1">   >     uri="rdf:*" label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"/>   > >   The example below shows how we might set other attributes of a button using a datasource. Of course, this assumes that the datasource supplies the appropriate resources. If a particular one is not found, the value of the att......

90 of 317 | Dean Edwards IE7.js 2.0 Release - The first famous “IE7″ out there was Dean Edwards script that fixed IE 6 in as many ways as possible. Now the IE7 browser itself has come out, Dean has updated his library to make sense in the new world, resulting in the new IE7.js 2.0 release which features: The IE7 project is now hosted on googlecode (I got fed up with SourceForge). IE7 is no longer modular. Instead I’ve merged the scripts into two: IE7.js and IE8.js IE7.js includes only fixes that are included in the real MSIE7 browser. All other enhancements are moved to IE8.js. IE7 is now much smaller (11KB gzipped). IE7 is now much faster (it uses the selector engine from base2.DOM) There are no dependencies on other files ......

91 of 317 | EditArea: Rich Sourcecode Editor - EditArea is a free JavaScript editor for source code. This editor is designed to edit source code files in a textarea. The main goal is to allow text formatting, search and replace and real-time syntax highlight. Features Easy to integrate, only one script include and one function call Tabulation support (allow to write well formated source code) Search and replace (with regexp) Customizable real-time syntax highlighting (currently: PHP, CSS, Javascript, Python, HTML, XML, VB, C, CPP, Pascal, Basic, Brainf*ck) Auto-indenting new lines Line numerotation Multilanguage support (currently: Croatian, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese) Possible PHP......

92 of 317 | Ajatus: Distributed CMS using CouchDB - Ajatus is a new distributed CRM that “runs as a local Ajax web application on your own computer. It uses the CouchDb object database for data storage and enjoys a wide range of plug-in and replication possibilities.” The Ajax side of the house uses jQuery for fun and profit. It is a lot of fun to see people get excited and creative around CouchDb, which recently had the first major release featuring: a REST API using JSON instead of XML for data transport, a JavaScript view engine based on Mozilla Spidermonkey, a GNU Autotools build system supporting most POSIX systems (Noah Slater) , a built-in administration interface (Christopher Lenz), experimental fulltext search with Lucene......

93 of 317 | JSTM: Java Shared Transacted Memory for GWT - After my Google Gears talk at JavaPolis, I spoke to the nice fellow, Cyprien Noel, behind JSTM, Java Shared Transactional Memory for GWT. This tool allows you to automatically have state shared among clients. This could be a great solution for certain sync scenarios if we make it work in the Gears world. The same syncing that is done on the server with multiple clients could be used when merging online and offline worlds. jstm4gwt is specialized for making easier the developpement of distributed gwt-ajax applications ( jstm4gwt is available for GWT/Java heavy clients/.NET clients). This framework let the user being focused on the functional data he wants use into his gwt ajax applicati......

94 of 317 | The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today - Jacob Rus keeps the run of great content on Comet Daily by talking about the the future of Comet: Part 1: Comet Today. Jacob discusses the hacks that we use for Comet, compared to the server-sent events and event-source specs that are finally getting implemented. He then goes through the current trade-offs behind current solutions: “Forever-frame” iframe streaming htmlfile ActiveX object XHR multipart XHR streaming XHR long-polling Script tag long-polling (“CometP”) Flash and other plugins With this impressive list of transports, we can cover all recent browsers (IE 5+, Safari 1.3+, Firefox 1.0+; Opera 8.5+ as described next time) without unseemly side-effects, using our choic......

95 of 317 | WriteMaps.com: A tool for website planning - Scott Jehl set out to make the website planning process more efficient and fun. Tired of dealing with expensive tools that were either way overpriced or simply didn’t meet his needs, he choose to build a site that did what he wanted and with the plan of letting others developers take advantage of the new tool. Hence, WriteMaps.com was born: There are many ways to create a sitemap, most of which involve expensive software, tedious box drawing, and other annoyances that get between your ideas and your results. What if this process could be more collaborative and efficient? This is the question that led to the creation of WriteMaps. With WriteMaps, you can set up an account and work together......

96 of 317 | Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Ajax for Chat - Ever wanted to build a chat module for your application? Jack Herrington shows you how in this tutorial on the IBM Developerworks site. Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript™ + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software. While not exactly Meebo, the tutorial does provide the foundation for building your own little chat app and uses the powerful Prototype library for it's client-side code. Here is some of the code that Jack listed in the tutorial. The full code for the tutorial can be found here. PLAIN TEXT ......