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Posts bookmarked on: Ajaxian
09 July 2009
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14:06
jQuery Visualize: Updated accessible charts and graphs
Scott Jehl has released jQuery Visualize, the plugin that groks HTML tables and generates lovely charts from it, all from a simple $('table').visualize(); (lot's of options for you to twiddle too if you want). First, you create a bog standard table like: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <table> <caption>2009 Individual Sales by Category</caption> <thead> [...]
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16 June 2009
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10:36
Doodle: Sprite library for Canvas
Billy Lambert got tired having to get so low-level as you do with the raw Canvas API. So, he create a small abstraction layer: Doodle.js attempts to create a fun and easy way to interact with the Canvas that is lightweight, flexible, and functional. While it contains a few shape primitives it is not meant to [...]
15 June 2009
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16:41
CSS3 breaking in the design community
CSS3 properties can greatly improve your workflow, making some of the most time-consuming CSS tasks a breeze and allowing for better, cleaner and more lightweight markup. Some properties are still not widely supported, even by the most recent browsers, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t experiment with them or give visitors with modern browsers advanced [...]
11 June 2009
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11:27
jQuery Tools
Tero Piirainen has created a new package of jQuery Tools. This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new [...]
02 June 2009
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15:47
IE8 vs. IE6: Rise of the new machine
Asa has an updated look at the current browser stats and trends and what is probably most interesting is the image above showing the rise of IE 8. This is something to dance about, as we see the decline in IE 6. Notice how IE 7, the browser with the most share in these stats is [...] -
13:25
CSS Gradient Tool; Build the Apple Navigation Bar
John Allsop has created a very cool CSS gradient exploration tool that lets you get the gradient you need, with the resulting sample and code right there. You could use it to do what he did, and recreate the Apple navigation bar in pure CSS instead of using images. John didn’t stop there, and has already created [...]
27 May 2009
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12:50
CSS Gradients in Action
Chris Williams has been having some fun with CSS gradients on a quest to create nice looking elements without images. He uses CSS like this: PLAIN TEXT CSS: .albumInfo { background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#626262), to(#000000), color-stop(.5, #202020), color-stop(.5, #000000)); height: 8em; padding: 1em; border-top: [...]
21 May 2009
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12:31
Digg shows Multipart XMLHttpRequest prototype
Micah Snyder of Digg posted on DUI.Stream, an experimental library that implements a multipart XHR technique to bundle resources into one request and then breaks them out at the other end: One of the ways that high-performance websites like Yahoo suggest speeding up load times is by reducing the number of HTTP requests per page. We [...]
20 May 2009
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13:14
EcmaScript 5: Changes to JavaScript
Three Googlers, Mark Miller, Waldemar Horwat, and Mike Samuel gave the talk above to discuss how JavaScript is changing, and gets into detail on EcmaScript 5. The slides that go along with the talk are available in good ole simple HTML prezo form and show that the talk discusses topics such as: Accessor support: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var domoid = [...] -
12:31
jQuery vs. MooTools
Normally when you see a title like jQuery vs. MooTools you get ready for the flame bait. You would expect it even more so if you found out that someone from one of the frameworks wrote the post! Well, Aaron Newton did just that, and I think he did a very good job at trying to [...]
28 April 2009
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10:26
Even designers are using CSS3? :)
Sean Martell is my hero. He did the Bespin logos and a bunch of the Mozilla works in general. When Ben and I were in Toronto we got to see him at work at his WACOM tablet, and it is a sight to behold. I wish I could do that kind of design work, but for [...]
21 April 2009
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18:00
Persevere’s JavaScriptDB: Impressive JSON Performance
Kris Zyp recently posted about an intriguing new chapter in the application persistence space: The latest beta of Persevere features a new native object storage engine called JavaScriptDB that provides high-end scalability and performance. Persevere now outperforms the common PHP and MySQL combination for accessing data via HTTP by about 40% and outperforms CouchDB by 249%. [...] -
16:59
An Introduction to W3C Widgets
The king of browser compatibility tables, ppk, recently posted an introduction to W3C Widgets: The time has come to talk about the W3C Widgets part of my job. Exactly what is a widget, how do you create one, why would you want to, and which systems support them? Personally I firmly believe that widgets are the future [...]
17 April 2009
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16:07
Quince: UX Pattern Explorer (in Silverlight)
A reader recently pointed us to Quince, an on-line directory of UX design patterns created by Infragistics. At first glance, Quince seems an Ajax application with some interesting animated effects, but it turns out to have been written using Silverlight (no surprise given Infragistics background). Run-time platform notwithstanding, Quince contains around 100 patterns with large numbers [...]
15 April 2009
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13:06
Horizontal Accordion 2.0 for jQuery
Alexander Graef wrote in to tell us about the excellent Horizontal Accordion jQuery plug-in, which takes an unordered list: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <ul class="test"> <li><div class="handle"><img src='images/title1.png'></div><img src='images/image_test.gif' align='left'> <h3>Content 1</h3> <p>...</p> </li> <li><div class="handle"><img src='images/title2.png'></div><img src='images/image_test.gif' align='left'> <h3>Content 2</h3> <p>...</p> </li> <li><div class="handle"><img src='images/title3.png'></div><img src='images/image_test.gif' align='left'> <h3>Content 3</h3> <p>...</p> </li> <li><div [...]
14 April 2009
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10:12
Browser storage: What is the correct API? SQL? JSON?
(The following is repost from my personal blog). Ian Hickson: “I expect I’ll be reverse-engineering SQLite and speccing that, if nothing better is picked first. As it is, people are starting to use the database feature in actual Web apps (e.g. mobile GMail, iirc).” When I read that comment to Vlad’s post on HTML 5 Web Storage [...]
10 April 2009
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10:25
The shifting of the Web; Browsers over time
Asa Dotzler of Mozilla has tried to compile data from a bunch of resources to create the chart above, a view of the Web over time from a browser perspective. The first thing that really jumps out at me is that Netscape, for all its early success, was used by relatively few people. The pie was [...] -
09:28
FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP
FirePHP solves the problem of AJAX debugging by sending debug information along with the response. To avoid breaking the response content, the debug information is placed into special HTTP response headers. This works for all types of requests, not just AJAX requests, which means you can even debug requests for images that are dynamically generated [...]
08 April 2009
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13:29
CSS Sprite Creator
Chris Brainard wrote in to tell us about his new CSS Sprite Creator: Cool!
07 April 2009
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06:13
CSS is Awesome, so what about JavaScript?
That is a great mug, but the question is….. what can we do for JavaScript or HTML?
24 March 2009
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16:07
A New Memory Tool for the Web
Over at the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab, we’re starting work on a new tool to help web developers understand what’s going on with the memory management of their application: So how does a developer troubleshoot memory problems? There’s only one way good way to do it: use the operating system’s tools. Unfortunately, this option doesn’t provide [...] -
10:39
Firefox support for CSS3 multiple backgrounds
James Hall saw the good news in Bugzilla that CSS3 multiple backgrounds are now in the Firefox tree, and you can test a Firefox Nightly (Minefield). Firefox joins Safari in the support. Usage? PLAIN TEXT CSS: background-image: url(../pix/logo_quirksmode.gif), url(../pix/logo_quirksmode_inverted.gif); background-repeat: repeat-y; background-position: top left, top right; -
05:04
Apple’s CSS and SVG work starts to make it to W3C
On Friday, the SVG and CSS working groups of the W3C published the first working drafts of Apple’s proposed graphics and styling extensions: The CSS and SVG Working Groups delivered today five new specifications for public review, aimed at enabling more compelling content creation with open Web technologies. The five drafts are: SVG Transforms 1.0, Part 2: Language, [...]
17 March 2009
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18:11
Ajax Experience Talks: Resig, Slocum, and Heilmann
We’ve got another great round of talks for you today from John Resig, Jack Slocum, and Christian Heilmann. Advanced jQuery with John Resig Advanced CSS and Theming of Ext with Jack Slocum Visual Programming with JavaScript with John Resig YUI for Control Freaks with Christian Heilmann
13 March 2009
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10:11
Custom info windows with jQuery and Google Maps
Ben Nolan has a writeup on a new feature in his Weheartplaces application that tweaks the info popup that comes with Google Maps by using a custom overlay. He walks us through an example that ends up with an Infowin class like this: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: // Infowin class for displaying a miniature info window. Does not // respond [...]
27 February 2009
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05:53
Multi-file upload in the Flickr and Gmail house
I saw two posts at the same time on the topic of multiple-file uploading from a Web app which is a topic that we have covered many times before. This time we have our good friend Scott Schiller posting on the Flickr uploader. He details the user experience from file selection, to progress, to completion, and [...]
24 February 2009
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17:45
Safari 4: New look, but what about the engine
Great news for Web developers and users, Safari 4 has a public beta, and it comes with some nice features such as: tabs on top and top sites (a la Chrome), full page zoom, history view, and ARIA Support. The Twitter thumbnail is interesting But, what about the engine? Here are some of the features as Apple [...]
23 February 2009
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11:56
Watching Prototype events and a nice little tip
Kangax shows a nice use of Prototype as he writes a tip to let you see your Prototype based events as they run in your application. A nice little view. He also realized that the core piece of the bookmarklet is actually a nice view of the power of Prototype as a library: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: $H(Event.cache).inject(0, function(m, p) [...] -
06:51
Building a presentation experience using CSS transitions and animations
JavaScript guru extraordinaire Erik Arvidsson has been playing with the new CSS transitions and animations that WebKit lead out with. He decided to build a sample presentation system: It is interesting to see the three versions that he builds. First, he uses CSS animations and @keyframes, and all that goodness, but for what he was doing it had [...]
22 February 2009
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10:04
Cross-Browser Inline-Block
Ryan Doherty has one of those really nice articles that walk you through how to do something that should be easy in CSS but isn't, until you know how: Cross Browser Inline Block. By the end of it all you will have this: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <style> li { width: 200px; min-height: [...]
20 February 2009
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14:00
Windows iPhone Simulator
There’s no way to emulate the iPhone on Windows, but Shaun Sullivan has the next best thing: taking a Windows build of WebKit and embedding it inside an iPhone-like Chrome. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as Windows users are going to get for now–and is very handy for checking how your site will [...]
18 February 2009
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20:31
JavaScriptMVC 1.5 Released
Justin Meyer emailed me to let me know that JavaScriptMVC, the framework that provides a Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern for JavaScript development, has been updated and version 1.5 is offically available for download. New features include: Env.js/Shrinksafe based compression: A custom env to simulate the browser. As the browser encounters script tags, it adds them to a [...]
17 February 2009
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15:00
jQuery Ajax Experience Framework Videos
Today's post of Ajax Experience videos from our Fall 2008 show features jQuery. Enjoy! Intro to jQuery with John Resig Advanced jQuery with John Resig An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI with Paul Baukus Rich Interactivity, Simplified, with jQuery UI with Richard Worth jQuery on Rails (The Real Ones) with Jonathan Sharp
09 February 2009
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09:02
A couple of weeks in HTML 5
Mark Pilgrim release a couple of HTML 5 roundup posts in a row. In his first post he talks about: Big news #1: r2692, a major revamp of the way application caches are defined. Application caches are the heart of the offline web model which can be used to allow script-heavy web applications like Gmail [...]
06 February 2009
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14:00
True JavaScript Hash Table
While it's great that JavaScript has a built-in hash-like mechanism, but it is limited to string keys. Tim Down recently filled us in on his project to create a more flexible hash table: I occasionally want a proper hash table in JavaScript, by which I mean something that can map an arbitrary key object with another arbitrary value [...] -
06:23
CSS Animations in WebKit Nightly and iPhone
Fire up WebKit nightly, or point your recently updated iPhone to check out this beautiful leaf animation all made possible with CSS Animation. A simple bounce animation is shown to give you an idea of how it works: PLAIN TEXT CSS: @-webkit-keyframes bounce { from { left: 0px; } to { left: 200px; } } A @-webkit-keyframes block contains rule sets called keyframes. A keyframe [...]
02 February 2009
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12:09
JSINQ: LINQ style access for JavaScript objects
PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: from customer in $0 group customer by customer.lastname into g select {lastname: g.getKey(), count: g.count()} into r orderby r.count descending select r The code above should look similar to LINQ in .NET and runs with JSINQ a framework created by Kai Jäger. With JSINQ, you can write SQL-like queries (or LINQ-like if you will) against arrays, DOM node lists or your [...]
26 January 2009
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10:59
RockstarApps’ Web Optimization plugins for Eclipse and Aptana
Bob Buffone has some interesting performance plugins for Eclipse and Aptana, so I asked him to tell us a little about them. He came up with this: This week RockstarApps released a beta version of jsLex 1.2. The goal of project is to “codify” all the research that has been done in Web Optimization by people [...]
23 January 2009
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10:19
JSLint Multi: Continously monitor multiple JavaScript files
Michael Schøler and Jakob Kruse have created JSLink Multi a widget that acts as a continous linter for the Yahoo! Widgets platform: JSLint Multi uses Douglas Crockford’s excellent JSLint tool to check your Javascript files for potential problems. Drag a folder unto JSLint Multi, and it will give you an overview of the JSLint status of every [...]
22 January 2009
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14:12
Having fun in the Ajax Playground
Ben Lisbakken, a chap who I had the pleasure to work with at Google, has done a really nice job creating a Google Ajax API Playground, an area that allows you to touch and feel the APIs in real-time: Ben said: The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs [...]
16 January 2009
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11:10
XUI: A JavaScript Library for Mobile Devices
Brian Leroux and some of the PhoneGap team have created XUI, a JavaScript library aimed at mobile development. Why? We hear your words. Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery. A big reason [...]
15 January 2009
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05:54
Chris Wilson interview on Tech Luminaries
Our latest Tech Luminaries episode features Chris Wilson, so I thought I would cross post it here, for those that are interested. Chris Wilson is the Platform Architect of Internet Explorer, but has been involved in web browsers from close to the very beginning having worked on the original NCSA Mosaic. He sat down with us [...]
14 January 2009
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15:19
Happy Birthday jQuery! v1.3 is Released
Disclosure: I’m a member of the jQuery Project team Back on January 14, 2006, a brash, young and talented developer named John Resig put out a personal project to the OSS world and hoped it could benefit *someone*. Little did he know that 3 years later, his side project would become one of the most influential [...]
12 January 2009
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17:48
YUI Compressor Online
Rodolphe Stoclin has created a simple Web wrapper on top of the YUI Compressor that let’s you throw up your JavaScript and get back a compressed version. It uses jQuery to do the inline results and show you the compression rate.
09 January 2009
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14:11
Beautiful Code Documentation
Atul Varma (who I have the absolute pleasure to work with now) has created code documentation that actually looks beautiful. Typography matters. You can check it out via his Ubiquity documentation example that shows you side by side documentation with the actual source code itself. This context is terrific. He does this all dynamically, and uses [...]
31 December 2008
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14:01
Why Load Testing Ajax is Hard
Today we are fortunate to have a guest post by Patrick Lightbody, most recently of BrowserMob fame (and previously Selenium work, OpenQA, WebWork, and more). Let’s listen in to him talk to us about load testing, and let him know your thoughts in the comments below: I’ve been developing and testing complex [...]
30 December 2008
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18:18
Ajax Experience Videos: Performance and Security
Thanks to the folks at Adobe, we’ve got video of pretty much every session from the Ajax Experience 2008 that we can share on-line, free of charge. We’ll release them over the next week or so in batches. What better way to spend your New Year’s holiday than curled up with a laptop learning about [...]
29 December 2008
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14:01
Eeking out performance in script loading
Steve Souders has detailed the coupling of script loading with various asynchronous techniques with examples that show the timings that you can get. First he sets the scene: One issue with async script loading is dealing with inline scripts that use symbols defined in the external script. If the external script is loading asynchronously without thought [...] -
11:07
mod_v8: Another Server Side JavaScript
Paul Querna wrote a fun little Apache module called mod_v8 that offers a proof of concept of Yet Another Server Side JavaScript: After using Rhino for server side javascript at work, I can say I somewhat like server side javascript. Others like Steve were already convinced a long time ago. However, I don’t really like being tied [...]
23 December 2008
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11:57
Thomas Fuchs comes back with some JavaScript tips
Thomas has been busy working on freckle, but has jumped back onto his blog again to give us some short tips: Preventing console.log breakage We have all been there. After a serious Firebug session, you forget to take out the console statements. Or, maybe you like to keep them in for the future. To be sure, you [...]
18 December 2008
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10:57
Steve’s State of Performance 2008
Steve Souders has a nice performance roundup for 2008 that details some of the important utilities and knowledge that we gained this year. His post gets even more interesting when he posits about the future, including: Visibility into the Browser: Packet sniffers (like HTTPWatch, Fiddler, and WireShark) and tools like YSlow allow developers to investigate many of the [...]
12 December 2008
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11:55
The fundamental problems with CSS3
Matt Wilcox thinks that there are fundamental problems with CSS3 and he shared his thoughts. He starts by giving us some history of CSS and then gets into the meat: Why the Cascade is no longer enough HTML has been re-purposed to represent only the semantic properties of the page. Because CSS is only capable of cascading [...] -
09:05
More JavaScript Inheritance; Prototypes vs. Closures
Steffen Rusitschka has a nice detailed post on inheritance with JavaScript, different ways you can go, and side effects of the decision. From, PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var A = function(){}; // This is the constructor of "A" A.prototype.value = 1; A.prototype.test = function() { alert(this.value); } var a = new A(); // create an instance of A alert(a.value); // => 1 alert(a.test()); // => [...]
05 December 2008
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19:16
JSOS: jQuery based desktop
There have been plenty of JavaScript desktop in the browsers of the years (ah WebOS!). James Luterek has posted about the latest jQuery based desktop environment. I started creating an operating system like user interface in JavaScript. I had intended to use it for the admin sections of my content management system(that runs this website), but [...]
02 December 2008
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09:39
XBug: New JavaScript Debugger
Greg Salisbury has released a new JavaScript debugger called XBug that “currently runs on the Windows XP/Vista platform, but, it can also be used to debug webpages on Windows or Linux servers. It’s cross-browser compatible, and works with Chrome, Firefox 2/3, IE 6/7, and Safari 3. After selecting your web page, you can then trace [...]
24 November 2008
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11:44
CSS Testing via Selenium
Gareth Rushgrove has published some code for CSS Test, code that lets you get in there and test resulting CSS: CSS is hard to test automatically. Their appear to be two potential approaches which might have merit in solving this problem and and this sample code represents one of them. test_image.py The basic idea here resolves around programatic comparison of [...] -
10:07
keyboardr.com: quicksilver in a web page
Julius Eckert has renamed and relaunched chosr to keyboardr. keyboardr is a homepage. It speeds up your internet experience. And if you like, it helps you keeping your hands on the keyboard. In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling [...]
19 November 2008
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15:33
Canvas in 3D
Peter Nederlof of the infamous Dutch “Lost Boys” created a 3D engine in Canvas. Straight from the horse’s mouth: I’ve been working on a 3D engine on canvas for some time, and as I was posting a message on our blog, I figured you guys might be interrested as well :) The demo is over here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/3d/ Another (completely [...] -
11:02
The Ajax side of AIR
AIR 1.5 has been released at MAX this week. For the folks that like to write AIR apps that at least have some JavaScript, you will be happy to see that WebKit has been updated: The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode [...]
18 November 2008
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15:00
Detect Ajax Framework with WTFramework
Because viewing the source is too bothersome, we now have WTFramework (short for “What The Framework”, obviously), a bookmarklet that will detect and display the Ajax / JavaScript frameworks used in the current website. It does so by checking for loaded JavaScript objects for each framework, not by analyzing the <script> element URIs. Handy.
17 November 2008
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14:44
Trying to be private in JavaScript
Erik Arvidsson has an updated take on instance private, class private, package and friends. One thing that shoots out at you is actually at the end: Gmail was written without any true private members. We just use a naming convention. We love to focus on little geek things like encapsulation, but once again... you can write amazing, complex [...]
13 November 2008
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13:01
Projective texturing using Canvas
Steven Wittens has taken on a challenge to make fake 3D in Canvas and built a library for projective texturing: Canvas is still limited to 2D: its drawing operations can only do typical vector graphics with so-called affine transformations, i.e. scaling, rotating, skewing and translation. Though there have been some efforts to try and add a [...] -
05:54
Timing in JavaScript and browsers can’t be trusted
This is officially the week of John. If he delivers top notch posts for the rest of the week he wins an Ajaxian award or something. Maybe we need to bring back the “pack of cards” where each card is an Ajax personality and John gets to be Ace of Hearts or something. I remember talking [...]
12 November 2008
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14:23
Dojo Extensions for AIR
SitePen has built an interesting set of APIs to enable you to create better JavaScript applications that run in the AIR platform: This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to create rich desktop apps using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR like the Dojo Toolbox. The extensions offer convenience methods for your application, wrapping many [...] -
12:00
JxLib: New Browser UI Toolkit
To the ranks of Ext JS, jQuery UI, Dijit, and others comes JxLib, a new browser-based UI toolkit built on top of MooTools. Jason Fournier from the team passed the announcement to us: JxLib includes layout managers, buttons, tabs, toolbars, dialogs, panels, trees and a basic grid control all designed to work together. It is heavily [...] -
05:01
Time Picker UI
John Resig linked to an interesting new time picker UI that Maxime Haineault implemented as a jQuery plugin: He made a “two click” time picker. The first click is within the time field. This activates the display and allows the user to choose the time - all of which is done by moving the mouse over [...]
11 November 2008
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11:25
Firebug tricks, Dojo style
Tom Trenka has a nice posting on Dojo and Firebug Tricks for Development where he shares two of his own: Trick #1: using window.location.search to enable Firebug Lite on the fly With the Dojo Toolkit, I find this trick indispensable. The basic concept is to use the original version of the djConfig variable—the object-based one—using a boolean [...]
07 November 2008
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14:00
JavaScript Graph Plotting Tool
We've seen the community do a lot with <canvas> over the past few months, and every so often it's fun to see the good ol' <div> approach to graphics and animation. Tavs Dokkedahl gives us a good one of those with his JavaScript Graph Plotting Tool: As part of a larger animation framework I have created a [...] -
12:38
What makes a Web application?
Robert O’Callahan, someone I am proud to consider a colleague now, has written some thoughts on the essence of Web applications where he discusses what makes a webapp at its core. As browsers continue to tie closer to desktop services via new APIs, great single-site browser apps, and the use of Web technology on the desktop [...] -
12:00
CSS-VFX: CSS Visual Effects Tutorials and Components
We’ve talked a bit about Apple’s extensions to HTML and CSS; <canvas> has of course gone on to much fame and fortune. Charles Ying pointed us to his CSS-VFX project which aims to be a collection of components and code examples that illustrate the power of CSS Visual Effects. So far, only 1 gem that [...]
06 November 2008
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14:31
HTML 5: The Section Element
Mark Pilgrim kicked off a series of posts that keep track of the goings on in HTML 5, and has now created the first article in a new series: The Road to HTML 5 - Episode 1: the section element. The Road to HTML 5 will go into detail on a particular feature of HTML 5 [...]
05 November 2008
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01:36
The Ajax Universe: Ben and Dion showcase the Presentation Randomizer
This was my favourite presentation of the year. Ben and I have given a lot of talks together, and to spice things up we created the presentation randomizer, a simple Ajax app that would sound a buzzer at random times. Why did we do this? When the buzzer went, we would have to instantly change [...]
04 November 2008
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16:52
Weed Out Obtrusive JavaScript
By now, most developers have (or should have) come to realize how important it is to build unobtrusive JavaScript code. Apart from ensuring a better user experience, today’s tools and libraries make it extremely easier to embrace this practice. Continuing down the path of providing developers good tools, Robert Nyman of DOMAssistant fame has updated his [...]
03 November 2008
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11:38
Fx.Matrix: Wrapping CSS transforms and IE filters
Nir Tayeb, a Web developer in Israel, has written up a new Mootools Fx effect class that creates a linear transformation effect using the new transform CSS property (of Safari and Firefox) and or the IE Matrix filter: I've created a class extending Fx class and learned for the first time how to create custom effects. It is [...]
30 October 2008
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14:59
The Ajax Revolution: From UI responsiveness to functionality and beyond
This comes as part of the from my personal blog series… In recent presentations, Ben and I have been taking a look back on the rise of Ajax (where Ajax == popularity of dhtml :). At its core, I think it all comes down to UI responsiveness. When you look at the killer apps such as Google [...] -
06:19
Language JSONP Service
Ben Lisbakken, an ex-colleague from Google and all round good guy, has created a simple JSONP service (in the vein of json-time and html-whitelist) that calculates the users language based on browser headers: http://langdetect.appspot.com/?callback=setLanguage This will return something like: setLanguage({”languages”: ['en-us', 'en']}); Ben created a nice little sample that shows you content in the language you desire using the [...]
29 October 2008
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14:56
Yahoo! BrowserPlus Released
Yahoo! has had a big day with a lot of Open platform releases (OpenSocial, YAP, etc) and to add to that they have released Yahoo! BrowserPlus version 2.1.6, which is important as it opens up the BrowserPlus platform for anyone to use. It features: Google Chrome and IE 6 support Smaller 2mb installation End user configuration panel for managing [...]
28 October 2008
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14:39
How to structure your JavaScript code
Peter Michaux has shared how he structures his code these days, as he has settled on a pattern: The code example below is a simple little logger widget. It appends messages to a list and has a clear link to delete all the recorded messages. PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: // Wrap code with module pattern. (function() { var global = this; [...] -
11:19
Delaying JavaScript Execution
Matt has a nice post on delaying JavaScript execution in a way that waits for certain events to finish: If you're looking to execute javascript code whenever someone finishes (or stops temporary) scrolling, moving the mouse, or resizing the page, you may find the following segment of code useful. He shares the following boilerplate code: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var onFooEndFunc [...]
27 October 2008
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13:47
Typeface.js: A potential replacement for sIFR
Thanks to Nexus I saw a new project called typeface.js that offers a solution to typeface management (where you can use any typeface that you want, whether it be on the users system or not) without using Flash (which the popular, oft-mentioned sIFR uses): Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site's [...]
24 October 2008
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14:57
CSSHttpRequest: cross-domain Ajax using CSS for transport.
XHR is so 1997. Now it is time for some CSSHttpRequest action, a device that allows you to run cross domain Ajax requests thanks to a CSS hack: Similar to JavaScript, this works because CSS is not subject to the same-origin policy that affects XMLHttpRequest. Like JSONP, CSSHttpRequest is limited to making GET requests. Unlike JSONP, [...]
13 October 2008
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17:15
Ajaxians join Mozilla; Creating a Developer Tools Group
Today, we are really excited to be able to announce a big personal change. Ben and I are joining forces, full time, for the first time. What are we doing? We are joining Mozilla to create a new group with the charter to create developer tools for the Open Web. Mozilla is placing a big [...] -
11:40
Ruby on jQuery and Closures
Sam Ruby has that way about him that sees things very clearly. He just took a peak at jQuery for the first time and was able to really put into words what I think jQuery enthusiasts like about the library: The notable thing about this is that despite all of the asynchronous events taking place, the [...]
11 October 2008
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00:13
Maintainable JavaScript videos are now available.
One month ago, the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam featured several “deep dive” talks on various web development topics. Stuart Langridge for example explained in detail what closures are and I talked about Maintainable JavaScript. The slides of my talk have been available for quite a while now and now Bachelor ICT have released the videos [...]
10 October 2008
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11:32
Reinhardt: a Client-side Dispatch Framework
Kevin Dangoor of SitePen has introduced Reinhardt a dispatch engine on the client side: A typical server-side web framework today includes three main components: a URL dispatching to some controller object scheme, a template engine, and a data mapping facility. Currently in Dojo, you’ll find that the latter two items already exist. dojox.dtl provides the first [...] -
10:26
IE8 and Standards
Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software has updated his post on IE 8 to cover beta 2: XDomainRequest: Microsoft unfortunately continues with XDomainRequest rather than making changes to XMLHttpRequest as other browsers are doing and as is being standardized by the W3C Web Apps Working Group. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of XMLHttpRequest Level 2.) [...]
09 October 2008
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15:26
Exclusive iPhone in Action Chapter Downloads
Now that the NDA has been released, book publishers are finally able to get out their wares. Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline have written iPhone in Action, and have kindly given the Ajaxian community free downloads of a couple of the early access chapters: SDK Programming for Web Developers delves into the introduction to Objective-C and [...]
08 October 2008
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17:19
Pimp My Site with CSS and Prototype
Do you like some code pimpage? We saw a couple of interesting posts on this recently in fact. First, our own Christian Heilmann took a table based layout, and in short order turned it over to the light via YUI Grids and CSS. He took this: And it quickly became this: He has made the code available, and is [...]
03 October 2008
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17:11
Practical Functional JavaScript
Oliver Steele gave a great talk at The Ajax Experience this week on Practical Functional JavaScript. For his talk, he ended up creating a samples application where you can run the code directly, very similar to what John Resig did in Learn JavaScript. The samples take you through JavaScript world, stopping for: Callbacks Functions Closures Idioms Throttling Caching Retry