I am so happy that the NDA mess is over! Clancy has written about how you can have your iPhone Web app run in full screen and has a demo app that shows it off:
Here's an interesting link for a Friday. Viktor Zeman on Quality Unit sent us a link to "PostAffiliateXpress", some boring IT application with an interesting interface and an even more intriguing back-end.
The UI combines a Vista-like "Start" menu along with an OS X-like dock (using everyone's favorite fish-eye widget). It also has a built-in widget system that leverages Google Widgets. Overall, it's a pretty nice implementation of a desktop and windowing in Ajax.
The framework itself is "GwtPHP" which attempts to take all the advantages of GWT and deploy them to PHP backends in an attempt to solve the problem of limited Java-friendly hosting services. Unfortunately, the framework isn't available for use until sometime in early November.
Dual-License
The developers intend to use the familiar "free for hobbyists, pay up for commercial use" licensing model (what their licensing page calls a "what for what" model).
Give some feedback
Viktor says that they are quite keen to get feedback from folks on the project, so interested folks should get in touch, let them know what you think about the licensing model, and perhaps get early access, etc.
I got to meet Aaron Newton at The Ajax Experience, and he is a thinker. He was really taking in the various talks, and interactions, and you could tell that he was trying to work out various angles on the frameworks. What makes them different? What makes them popular? Where are they going?
He wrote a really nice post on some of these thoughts that goes into detail on different patterns for JavaScript programing. The meme at the show was definitely "the frameworks all do the same thing, just with a different looking API" which makes it even harder to put your finger on differences sometimes. Aaron does a good job.
John Resig himself gave a talk comparing the frameworks. Considering that he is Mr. jQuery, I thought he was very unbiased and had some good thoughts:
Kyle McGregor took a look at the JavaScript games for Life out there and decided to write a Canvas version that ends up being a lot snappier. The entire game is pretty small:
Netflix has a long history of presenting at the Ajax experience, starting with Sean Kane giving talks on their use of Ajax and their approach to usability to this year's presentation when Bill Scott revealed Netflix's new Ajax developer APIs.
If these APIs were just about allowing developers to manage rental queues, it would be of limited interest. Instead, the APIs are quite broad and include features like:
# Performing searches of movies, TV series, cast members, and directors
# Retrieving catalog titles, including details about the title such as name, box art, director, cast, etc.
# Determining the subscriber's relationship to a specific title, e.g, in queue, saved, available on DVD, etc.
# Managing and displaying queues for users
# Providing conveniences such as auto-completion of partial search terms typed by a user.
# Displaying a user's ratings and reviews.
# Including functional Add and Play buttons in your web application.
Alvaro Videla just wrote in to tell us about Firesymfony, a Firebug extension that provides an alternative to Symfony's built-in web debug toolbar.
sometimes the toolbar position makes impossible to use some features of the layout of our website, like a link menu on the top right corner. It also happens that while we display a small popup with the resize functionality disabled it’s turns hard to access all the data displayed by the toolbar.
The solution I’ve came up with is to move all the data from the toolbar to Firebug, actually, to port the symfony web debug toolbar as a Firebug extension. This will remove the toolbar from the page html and will show it in a convenient place that almost every web developer is used to.
Taking advantage from the cool new features of symfony 1.2 I started a project to develop a symfony plugin to send the data to the Firebug extension. The later has been smartly called FireSymfony.
2.6.0 introduces a new Carousel Control, offers the Paginator Control for general use (it was previously bundled with DataTable), includes more than 450 total fixes, enhancements and optimizations, graduates eight components out of “beta,” and now ships with more than 290 functional examples.
