Ajaxian » Roundup

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

Dion Almaer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:07:07 +0000

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

YUI Autogrid: Correctly resize the grids

MooTools

jQuery

Gears, AIR, and more

Design: CSS, SVG, Canvas

Showcases

Utilties

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

Dion Almaer — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:34:23 +0000

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

Google releases GWT for JavaScript 2
Book review: Advanced Ajax by Lauriat (Part 2 of 2)
But I’m not moving my mouse!
Audible Ajax Episode 25: State of Ajax
Popularity, History, and SCRIPT SHARED
Flinging APIs in the Highlands
Adobe Releases AIR for Linux, Joins LSF
Web Archeology: Java Pluglet API
SEO Rapper Friday
Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide

If you have some news that you would like to contribute, send us an email or tell us on Twitter.

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

Dion Almaer — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:00:25 +0000

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

DWR 3.0 Features, Interview with Joe Walker

Ext

Prototype

ProtoSafe Eases Compatibility for Prototype

jQuery

CSS / Design

Performance

Tools / Utilities

iPhone / Mobile

Databases

Showcases

Comet

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

Dion Almaer — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:58:22 +0000

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

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

Dion Almaer — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 05:47:39 +0000

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

YUI 2.4.0 Released

jQuery

Microsoft

DWR

Editorial

Security

Performance

Showcase

GWT

Comet

CSS

iPhone

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

Dion Almaer — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:36:10 +0000

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

Google Code Revamps with jQuery

YUI

Using the Yahoo Global Object to Manage Object Inheritance and Composition

GWT

Ext

Browsers

JavaScript

Articles / Editorial / Utilities

Offline

General Web / HTTP / Standards

Showcases

Components / APIs

Goofy

Mobile

We launched a new mobile oriented site called devphone. Keep up with mobile news. The big news this month was the launch of Android, and the WebKit browser that you get to not only call out too, but embed in your applications.

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

Dion Almaer — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:00:13 +0000

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:

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for September, 2007: JavaScript mashups take a step forward

Dion Almaer — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:30:38 +0000

September was a big month for Ajax development in my opinion. The new JavaScript API that lets you do cross domain secure read-write tells us what will be possible in the future. Now mashups can go from the useful read-only mashing, to powerful applications that let you do everything you need too.

We also saw more tips and tricks in JavaScript land, as well as expansions to new worlds.

Thanks for spending time participating in the community, and I look forward to the Autumn.

Dojo

Ext

Prototype

Protoscript: Prototype web apps with a JSON DSL

jQuery

YUI

Browsers

JavaScript

Offline

iPhone

Adobe

Ajaxian Featured Tutorials

Design

Comet

Showcases

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for August, 2007: CSS frameworks and the reboot of top frameworks

Dion Almaer — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:06:48 +0000

August is often a slow month. The summer is in full effect, which can lead to chill out time. It didn’t feel slow to me though, in fact, it has picked up a lot in the last few weeks. I have seen a noticeable increase in the number of submissions that we receive, and interesting news that comes down the pipe. This leads me to believe that we are going to have a great fall and winter.

But, back to August, and the trends that we have seen. Web developers are frustrated with the lack of practical innovation that they can use wrt CSS. We have rich JavaScript libraries that make JavaScript and Ajax easier to do from the JS side of things. We have the promise of faster JS runtimes with the like of Tamarin and maybe the DLR. HTML 5 made a splash and there is a hope that some of its goodness reaches into the real world. What about CSS? We are starting to see more frameworks come along to join the likes of YUI’s CSS work. It appears that once again Web developers are making the most of what they are given, and innovation on top. As we see how we can do this, I expect that we will continue to see new approaches to CSS. Layouts are painful, and tools and frameworks should be able to help us out more than they do now.

There were some significant reboots for some of the big guys. Prototype 1.6 is a great overhaul, with great stuff to come. Dojo’s 0.9 release marks its new future, which offers a lean base with a fantastic extension, and widget story. GWT 1.4 marks a “un-beta” release with a killer compiler and compelling features.

This is the tip of the iceberg. The iPhone keeps trucking. More applications are coming offline, and we are still learning a lot of interesting stuff about JavaScript.

I can’t wait to see what pops up in the coming months. Please let the community know, and join us in Boston. Here is the roundup!

Frameworks

jQuery

Prototype

Yahoo! UI

GWT

Dojo

Other

CSS

JavaScript

Browsers

Offline

Standards

iPhone

Showcases, Tools, and Components

AjaxRain.com gets a facelift, tops 600+ Ajax/JS/RIA controls

Rey Bango — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:00:13 +0000

AjaxRain.com, the site dedicated to aggregating Ajax, JavaScript and RIA controls & libraries, has gotten a cool facelift and some much needed features. On top of that, they continue to post controls at an amazing rate with 638 submissions at last count.

Some of the new nuggets include:

Storing favorites
Comments
Voting on entries
Date that a submission was posted
Enhanced search
Expansion into posting RIA components based on SilverLight & Flex

MiniAjax.com, a site that was doing the same thing and started off with a bang, has since gone stale and it looks like AjaxRain now leads the pack. Are there other sites like these? If so, post the links in the comments.

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for July, 2007: iPhone and the Plugin Wars

Dion Almaer — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:01:40 +0000

The summer is traditionally a slow time, but this July had some fun happenings. The iPhone buzz continued, and Episode 2: The Plugin Wars continued. Mozilla announced that their front was moving the battle to enemy territory. Brendan Eich said, “If we fight them over in IE, they won’t come fight us over here” ;) He then launched his Iron Screaming Monkeys and Microsoft retaliated by hinting that “for performance reasons” they may have to take out the scripting host in future versions of IE.

iPhone

Frameworks

Dojo

Script.aculo.us

ExtJS

Yahoo! UI

jQuery

jQuery 1.1.3: 800%+ Faster, still 20KB

JavaScript

Offline

CSS

Browsers

Tools

Showcases

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for June, 2007: Airing out the Gears

Dion Almaer — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:12:05 +0000

High Level / Big News

June has been a busy month, and the focus has been around the release of Google Gears, and the Apple iPhone. Both have shaken up the market showing the the future for Ajax is bright and expanding. It is reaching to the desktop, and the phone.

Offline: Gears and AIR

Shortly after Gears was released we saw a flurry of activity that consisted of apps being ported to work offline and libraries being extended to support offline use:

Adobe renamed Apollo to AIR and continues to stay in the news:

Mobile / iPhone

The hype around the iPhone is almost unprecedented. We have tried to keep from joining in, but there has been a lot of interesting work done around Ajax support, and the iPhone is pushing the bounds on Mobile Ajax, just by getting users online. The users will demand more, and vendors will have to step up. We will then have to deliver the applications that they deserve. In the US there isn’t the luxury of a top notch network, so we need to deliver it in a smart way too.

Browsers and Standards

With Safari for Windows being announced there has been a lot of talk around browsers. We also got some good news with significant IE memory leaks being fixed.

Ajax Libraries

General JavaScript

GWT

Moo

The FancyUpload with MooTools component is yet another attempt to help with browser based uploads.

Ext

Ext is growing from strength to strength. The team announced Ext 1.1 Beta + Feed Reader 3 Demo, thoughts on 2.0 alpha, a new Ext Accordion Control, and IDE support via Spket IDE: Ext Support. I think July will be an even bigger month.

Prototype

jQuery

Digg’s new comment system and jQuery

Showcases

Some high profile sites and apps have gotten an upgrade such as Apple, CNN, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets Updated.

We also saw useful tools such as an Entity Lookup that helps.

Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for May, 2007

Dion Almaer — Mon, 28 May 2007 19:44:51 +0000

We realize that it is an incredible tough job to keep up on what is happening in the Ajax community as it is so broad. We aim to bring you a few posts a day to take some of the burden off of you, but what about broader terms?

We are starting a new monthly roundup that aims to summarize what was important in the preceding month, based on our opinion, but more so on what you, the community, thought of the postings (rating and page views).

We are going to experiment with formats, but by splitting up the content, you can also get a feel for the ajax library landscape over time. Please let us know what you think, and if there is anything else that you would like to see.

Although it is a bank holiday in the US (memorial day), we realize that: a) some geeks don’t care and are working / browsing. b) most of our audience is not in the US. So, for you, we have the first roundup:

High Level / Big News

The big recent news is the emerging talk about the new platform wars of Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, and how the Open Web fits into all of this. Episode One may be the browser wars, but maybe Episode Two is the plugin wars?

The press has gone a little nuts on Silverlight and JavaFX. Both are just name changes, and we have known about WPF/E and F3 for quite awhile now. I couldn’t help by have a little fun myself.

On the Ajax front, a very interesting paper was released on a trusted implementation of cross domain access, which will be huge for mashup developers, and we are seeing more and more usage of dtrace to debug apps for Ajax, or Rails.

Browsers and Standards

Alex Russell thinks that the future of HTML is more important than any other worries on the Ajax side, and we agree. Everyone is watching the new W3C group, and although the group has taken on HTML 5 from the WHATWG, we wait to here how it will get tweaked. The group has been a little quiet.

Ajax Librarys

The core Ajax libraries are flourishing. They are getting more and more lean, mean, and solid. It becomes harder and harder to choose between then, and we are getting abstractions on top, such as Ext JS that are providing even more functionality.

Dojo

Dojo has announced a new 0.9. If you are watching this closely you will see that this is a big deal. This isn’t a slightly different Dojo. This is a revolutionary Dojo. The biggest complaint on the library has been the feeling that it is too bloated (it is incredible comprehensive). Do widgets need to be abstract enough to grok SVG and HTML (when the community is only using the HTML ones)? Does the remoting support need to bundle every funky transport layer? No. And, the Dojo team has realized this and has taken things into their hands and has revamped the framework as a lean, mean, beast that checks in at roughly the same size as Prototype. There is now ONE dojo.js instead of having you package, or grab, one of many.

Dojo is being reborn as we speak, and the results are exciting to see.

Dojo 0.9 Update

Prototype
Prototype chucks along as a fantastic, solid, “I just want to add a bit of Ajax guys, not boil the world” Ajax library. Version 1.5.1. was released, and it gets faster and cleaner than ever.

jQuery

jQuery seems to be going from strength to strength. Maybe that is why idiots decided to DOS the project… they don’t like success. The simple plugin architecture is allowing people to add functionality easily to the library without bloating it. Somehow the implementation has resulted in many more plugins in the community than elsewhere.

GWT

I was asked a lot of questions on GWT at JavaOne (no surprised based on the conference). It seems to be picking up steam, and many Java programmers are enjoying the choice.

QueWeb Customer Care GWT Application

Mootools

Moo always has a nice little following that produces a lot of content. This month was no exception.

Conclusion

As the month comes to a close, we are looking forward to seeing the new platforms solidify over the summer, as frameworks go from alpha to beta to live.
The Ajax Experience Call for Papers Closed, and we are once again amazed at the community who made our choices incredibly tough.

Ben and I sat down and went through them all with the first pass acting as a “lets mark the must-haves first and then go back” walk through. Once we were done with that we already had chosen more content than we could fit in.

We can’t wait to see you on July 25-27 in San Francisco.

As always, if you see anything that you feel the community would enjoy seeing, please email us and let us know so we can cover it on the site.