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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

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Posted by Dion Almaer at 5:07 pm
10 Comments

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4 rating from 13 votes

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yeah, that *is* one heck of a month looking back at all those developments… so the question is, of that list, which ones are the real movers that we need to keep an eye on?

Comment by shadedecho — July 1, 2008

Too bad there’s no coverage of developments with the UIZE JavaScript Framework, with it finally now being opened for all to see and downloadable.
 
http://www.uize.com
 
Hopefully in time. It certainly was a significant development for the ZUI (Zazzle User Interface) folks at Zazzle.

Comment by uize — July 2, 2008

@Uzie

That really wasn’t necessary, and I’m sure I speak for most users here when saying shameless self-promotions should seek other sources, it just makes you look desperate.

Comment by matanlurey — July 2, 2008

@shadedecho
I think the html5 / js2 / gears stuff will be most important in the long term. The new frameworks we’ve seen (like sproutcore) are comparable in hype and market effect to their hype predecessors, like extjs, gwt, dojo and so on. Undoubtably those frameworks are really nice, but I don’t think they’re inherently more powerful (not in the long term at least).

Comment by Joeri — July 2, 2008

@Joeri
Interesting perspective. I think it’ll take a long time to see JS2 having a great effect and being leveraged. We’re still trying to kill off IE6 and fully take advantage of PNG and stop worrying about many IE6 related issues. What’s more compelling than language sugar is capabilities in the browser. Rich applications start getting really interesting when there are consistent and high performance ways of achieving vector graphics. Unless we start seeing these kinds of powerful visualization capabilities in browsers, Web standards will lose out to other technologies like Flash and – perhaps – Silverlight.

Comment by uize — July 2, 2008

@matanlurey
Wow! That’s *really* harsh, man. I’m pouring my life into developing code that is available as Open Source, for all to see, use, learn from, take ideas from, etc. It’s more of a contribution to the community than the average schmoe is making. So, then you go and attack me for trying to bring a little bit of attention to it. I don’t think everyone in the community is so averse to being made aware of other work in the world of Open Source. Way to go to encourage Open Source developers, dude. Now I totally feel like cr*p.

Comment by uize — July 2, 2008

@uize:
No that’s not harsh at all. I’m sorry, but you just keep spamming on and on about your framework, I’m also getting tired of that! There’s not a single post here (almost) that you don’t spam. Now don’t get me wrong: your framework probably is great and you’re doing good things (I suppose) for the community, but stop bugging us with that.
Besides: if your goal is really about promoting your framework, why bother making a nice looking website instead of this underdesigned uize.com?

Comment by PieturP — July 2, 2008

@uize:
One thing that might help is to address specific problems your work solves, especially in contrast with its competition. That would provide a lot more motivation for us to check out your work than “me too!” I think the other responses you’ve gotten were, while unnecessarily acerbic and lacking in helpful suggestions, understandable: why should any of us take time from what we’re doing or what we’re using to show an interest in your product? Give us a reason beyond the mere fact of its existence.

Comment by eyelidlessness — July 2, 2008

@eyelidlessness
You make good points. On the “me too” front, it’s worth pointing out that UIZE existed back in early 2005 when dojo was just a fledgeling. So, UIZE is not really new on the scene. What happened was that, on starting at Zazzle, I pretty much got drawn deep into the mad life of a fast growing startup company, to the detriment of spending the time necessary to prep the framework for others to use. I’m still catching up with documentation (who isn’t?).
 
Anyway, thanks for your well tempered and thoughtful response. I really appreciate it.

Comment by uize — July 2, 2008

@uize:
I didn’t mean “me too” as in “I’m going to make something too” but as in “I want attention too!” Can you please share some reasons we should take an interest in your project? I’ve seen you post a lot and just wondered… what? What does uize have to do with [given topic at hand]? And you never seem to answer that.

Comment by eyelidlessness — July 2, 2008

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