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Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for October, 2007: JavaScript wars, Java reborn, and Browsers wake up

Category: Roundup

<p>October has been a busy month. We are currently in a political and emotional roller-coaster that peaked after the ECMAScript 4 Language Overview was released. It is as though EC4 just sprang up, when in fact it has been chugging along for ages. Brendan has been talking about it for some time. At this point opinions are being aired all over the shop and as I finished the last post, I hope we can de-polarise the situation and get to work.

Browsers seem to be taking the charge recently. Webkit keeps adding great features, and with Leopard we now have Safari 3 churning out.

Mozilla is also branching out with projects such as Prism and Mobile Firefox. IE8 is still dark.

I covered the fact that Sun has announced how they have a new Java Plugin that is in the works. Many still scoff at Applets, which may by itself be the downfall. However, if Sun pulls it off, I think that Applets have a real place on the Web. Before you scoff think about how cheesy little XHR lay dormant for so long. Java down right in the browser can be a nice bridge to advanced functionality where you still can script away in JavaScript.

JavaScript on the Web keeps getting more featureful too though. I was really proud of out Blog.gears example that shows the path for rich read/write mashups, in this case also working offline. The open source Google Caja can also help us have the freedom to allow JavaScript to be in a page and not collide to do evil things. Caja makes a lot of sense when you think about OpenSocial.

All in all a great month, and here is to an exciting November that includes OpenSocial APIs, Dojo 1.0, and more.

The Details

Dojo

Ext

GWT

jQuery

Prototype

YUI

Gears / Offline

Browsers

JavaScript

CSS

Other:

Related Content:

Posted by Dion Almaer at 10:00 am
11 Comments

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4.1 rating from 10 votes

11 Comments »

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Heh … the day Ajaxian makes a category in one of these roundups for mootools is the day hell freezes over. And I know what you’re thinking … no … it is not one dude making all the mootools comments. There are at least half a dozen of us.

Comment by Marat Denenberg — November 1, 2007

That’s an impressive list there! Keep up the good work guys!

Comment by Marc — November 1, 2007

Wow, I’ve been evangelizing Gaia Ajax Widget (http://ajaxwidgets.com) as the “JavaScript free framework for Ajax” for months now and you’re beginning to pick up… ;)
Nice…!
Too bad it’s only the ActiveX2.0 features you’re picking up on and not the Web2.0 ones that matter… :(

.t

Comment by Thomas Hansen — November 1, 2007

Hey guys, if you want more of mootools, Gaia or any other framework on Ajaxian, why not tip the Ajaxian crew if you make or find something you think should be up here? I don’t think you can expect the Ajaxian crew to browse the entire Intarweb everyday to inform us of everything that’s going on? Tip them or if you choose not, stop whining.

Comment by Marc — November 1, 2007

Yes, more mootools please. For example, in October the mootools team showed some of the work in the upcoming 1.2 release. I’m most interested in the Hash and JSSpec. And there was a short Coder’s Eye article, “Mootools beats jQuery and Ext for AIR”: http://coderseye.com/2007/mootools-beats-jquery-and-ext-for-air.html

Comment by Jade Ohlhauser — November 2, 2007

@Marc
I’ve sent in more than 10 tips about Gaia news over the last 6 months, including several news about major releases and such, but unfortunately this doesn’t seem interesting enough for them…

Comment by Thomas Hansen — November 2, 2007

@Thomas
Did you ever ask why? It seems Gaia is mainly focused towards .NET, maybe thats it… (I see a lot of client side stuff on Ajaxian and thats why I come here)

Comment by Marc — November 2, 2007

And oh… is that a 30 day trail I see there? Whats up with that? Maybe thats the answer Thomas… (Or maybe it needs more explaining)

Comment by Marc — November 2, 2007

In the past month there have been countless articles around the internet about MooTools, not to mention 5 new articles in our blog. Anyone else changes the color of the links on their website and Ajaxian will tell us about it 12 times before I get out of the shower in the morning. Meanwhile when one MooTools post does make it on here (an awesome photo gallery by JonDesign) oops! someone forgot to tag it in the MooTools section.

It’s clear to the MooTools development team that we aren’t liked around here, and that’s absolutely no problem for any of us, none of us are regular readers anyway. The thing thats tragic is that users ask us all the time why we never get any coverage on here for all the work we do in the framework.

Every time, we respond the same way:
1. you guys simply don’t like us, and
2. a member of the jQuery ‘evangelism’ team is good friends with Dion, and jQuery reeally doesn’t like us.
There can be no other logical explanation for you guys to avoid MooTools like the plague, but of course, no one can tell you what to publish on your site. (this isnt Digg…)

The MooTools developers have no problems or issues with anyone here at Ajaxian, or anyone at jQuery. We feel jQuery and Prototype, (and the others) are all great frameworks in their own ways. If Ajaxian cares to be a little less biased in your posting, great, you’ll probably gain a few more regular readers. If not, absolutely no problem. It would just be nice to stop getting messages from our users every other day asking us why we are disliked so much.

okay, sorry for the rant!
–cheers all :)

Comment by Tom Occhino — November 2, 2007

@Tom: Stop whining allready. When I read the last 5 posts on the mootools blog I can understand why they are not mentioned. The first is a mention of the blog itself, the second mentions someone elses blogposts about mootools. The third is mootools style self promo: The best effects, now even better. Not exactally something Ajaxian would quote. If you want to make it clear that mootools is better, prove it. The fourth posts is about testing, usefull for mootools internally but not so important for those who just need mootools to work. The fifth is about Hash beeing the new thing in 1.2. When that was mentioned about Prototype they had a new release with Hash just beeing one of the new features.
If you’d email me about those blog posts I might actually start disliking mootools. Rethink the way you promote mootools. Also, a lot of the mootools fanboys around here have an attitude to just shamelessly plug it anywhere or whine about not beeing plugged, much like you are doing now, you should give a better example.

Comment by Trulli — November 3, 2007

Maybe I missed it, but is there a link to a site that lists the bugs in Javascript and CSS so that we can research them? I find new bugs every day at the most annoying times and I sure wish I could read about them first.
thankz

Comment by Stan — November 3, 2007

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