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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

State of Ajax for June 2008: Apple flexes Open Web muscles

Category: Roundup

June was a great month for the Open Web. First, Apple delivered a one-two punch with showing Mobile Me, powered by the native Web and SproutCore, and showing SquirrelFish as JavaScript starts to get a loooot faster on browsers. Firefox had a party as millions of people downloaded Firefox 3 final release, and immediately talked about 3.1 coming soon. The flywheel is moving. Opera 9.5 is also there, and IE 8 beta 2 is coming in August.

Velocity, the performance conference, also showed the interest in making the Web faster, as many tools were announced to help out us devs. We also saw a lot of cool uses of Canvas/SVG, as developers delve low level and see that they actually work very well.

So, we sit at the crux of two paths. On the one hand, browsers are getting faster and faster and adding great new technology for us (including small things like CSS variables. finally!). On the other hand, we are creating more compelling user experiences (e.g. 280 Slides, Mobile Me). These forces work with each other. As we do cooler apps that push the boundaries, the browsers have to come back with better performance and tools to match. Expectations are changing, and we need to match them.

Here is the full roundup:

Browsers

Standards

Performance

JavaScript

ExtJS

Dojo

YUI

MooTools

jQuery

Gears, AIR, and more

Design: CSS, SVG, Canvas

Showcases

Utilties

Posted by Dion Almaer at 5:07 pm
11 Comments

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3.4 rating from 8 votes

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Ajaxian Roundup for April, 2008: CSS goodness, Ext licenses, and the Cloud

Category: Roundup

March has flown by for me, and we had some great announcements, and some busy threads of discussion to show for it. The Webkit folk have had the great insight to realize that although SVG and canvas are still thought of as more advanced technology and are not mainstream in anyway, the problems that they can solve are very useful. In fact, you can take those tools and give specific solutions to use cases. For example, round some corners! The CSS animations and CSS masks work are killer good and exciting.

March was a coming out party for the Cloud, with the technical preview of Google App Engine and the news of the upcoming Aptana Cloud. I have a feeling that 2008 will be the “when we get to hit the DEPLOY button” year for developers, and I am very excited about it!

Finally, the ugly parts. Ext JS 2.1 was released, and with it came a license change. This brought up the undercurrent of some in the community that thought that the old license wasn’t valid, and with the GPL change we saw OpenEXT, the fork.

The Ext JS team is responding with open source exceptions, and is asking for community input.

Here is the full roundup:

JavaScript

jQuery

Prototype

Dojo

Ext

Moo

Browsers / Standards

CSS / UI

Mobile

Performance and the Cloud

Showcases / Games

Utiltiies / IDE

Misc / Humor

Posted by Dion Almaer at 12:34 am
Comment here

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5 rating from 7 votes

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Ajaxian Roundup for March, 2008: IE 8, Acid3, and Performance

Category: Roundup

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, with the betas looking top notch. I personally wouldn’t mind teaching the browser a couple of new tricks too.

Standards were in the air starting with the IE 8 standards mode switch and then jumping to the Acid 3 news, and even IE got some Acid groove.

Finally, we seemed to have a ton of news revolving around performance. Some of this came from testing the new browsers and seeing huge performance improvements, but others were just new general best practices. Performance seems to be on the forefront of peoples minds right now, which is great to see.

Thanks for a great month. Please contact us with Ajax news as you see it, and here is the roundup:

Browsers

JavaScript

Dojo

DWR

Ext

Prototype

jQuery

CSS / Design

Performance

Tools / Utilities

iPhone / Mobile

Databases

Showcases

Comet

Posted by Dion Almaer at 9:00 am
1 Comment

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4.9 rating from 7 votes

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Ajaxian Roundup for January, 2008: JavaScript Turtles and IE 8

Category: Roundup

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 DOM and having it all work and spit out HTML. This isn’t your old ASP JScript.

I also had the pleasure of chatting with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails: JavaScript MVC on the server where we discussed the implications of having a Rails port in JavaScript.

The browsers keep getting better, and we saw real support for Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest in Firefox 3 and the like. I have been talking over Google Gears future APIs that may be in early stage work, or just ideas in my head. I think that we are getting the word out about Gears not being just about Offline, but a tool to upgrade the Web on the fly.

We are seeing more of the social networks getting into the mix. Facebook released an Animation library and then followed that up with a full JavaScript Client Library.

And then Google just released the Social Graph API.

A great month, and here is to the next one:

JavaScript

Prototype

Dojo

Ext

jQuery

GWT

YUI

DWR

Gears

Flash / AIR

JSON

Browsers / HTML Standards

CSS / Design

Comet

Security

Editorial

Showcase

Posted by Dion Almaer at 12:58 am
3 Comments

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4.7 rating from 9 votes

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

Ajaxian Roundup for December, 2007: It’s the end of the year as we know it

Category: Roundup

Happy New Year. I was tempted to post a top ten list of the best aggregators of top ten lists, but decided against it ;)

I hope that 2008 finds everyone well, and the Web in a better place. In 2007, the Web development community has jumped a lot, but at the same time, hasn’t changed at all.

We have seen the browsers really kick into gear. Firefox 3 beta is looking surprisingly fast and good. WebKit has taken the browser world by storm from the stand point of so many companies hacking away on it. From Adobe AIR, to Android, to Nokia, and beyond. Opera gives us a good experience on the Wii.

And IE…. they have a name for the next browser, and showed a smiley face with the promise of good CSS.

The major libraries are all pretty solid, and the core features are all matched. It is hard to go wrong with your choice now if you keep to the main track. We had the promise of more tools, and Aptana has stepped up a little as well as others. In 2008, we should be seeing many more projects coming out of stealth mode. This is so needed as it is still too hard to develop web applications. For tonight, it is time to hope. Tomorrow, we try to make it happen.

Cheers to all. Here is the roundup:

Browser

JavaScript

Prototype

Ext

YUI

jQuery

Microsoft

DWR

Editorial

Security

Performance

Showcase

GWT

Comet

CSS

iPhone

Posted by Dion Almaer at 12:47 am
7 Comments

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4.1 rating from 13 votes

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for November, 2007: Defining JavaScript 2, making security less Caja, and mobile

Category: Roundup

The heat is really on with JavaScript 2. It feels like yesterday that ourselves and Lambda were the only people interested in trickling out news on updates to ECMAScript. Now everyone has a hat in the ring shouting about it. Just a week ago we saw Brendan speak on the topic. Before that we had the question on the future of ECMAScript, Doug Crockford talking about the security angle, John Resig actually showing code instead of talk, and finally a little Caja in the form of an open source library to help security.

Here’s the detailed roundup:

Toolkits

Dojo

Prototype / Script.aculo.us

Mootools

jQuery

YUI

GWT

Ext

Browsers

JavaScript