Web Info & Tutorials

Ben and I are sitting in a Sun briefing where Ken Russell of Sun is announcing that they have ground up rewritten the Java plugin in the browser. The features of the rewrite are:

• Improved scripting support (java/javascript integration is better)
• Improved reliability
• Supports more powerful applets (applets can ask for more memory)
• Better windows vista support (signed applets)
• Enterprise features (run one applet in a particular JRE version)

This will be released via a Java 6 update beta and they will have the new plugin turned off by default, and you will be able to turn it on via a switch in the Java control panel. It has been tested in IE 6, 7, Firefox 3 alpha, and they are hoping that Mozilla back ports the fixes to Firefox 2.

MTV and Adobe have teamed to put on a contest to choose the AIR app which makes the coolest use of MTV’s assets.

So you want to make an Adobe® AIR™ application, awesome. We’re looking for three great ideas - they could be anything. Go simple and practical or complex and addictive. It’s up to you! First, download Adobe® AIR™. Then check out all of the MTV assets available to pull in to your application - everything from MTV.com RSS feeds, Video & Podcast mRSS Feeds, and MTV Blog Feeds to and outlandish MTV art.

They’re offering up some sweet prizes including:

Total Request Application - Grand Prize

• Two night trip for two to New York City
• MTV “VIP” Night On the Town
• “Pitch Session” with MTV Networks Product Development Team
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection
• MP3 Player & One Year Subscription to Rhapsody Music Service

Pimp My Assets: Mashup - Finalist

• One night trip for one to New York City
• “Pitch Session” with MTV Networks Product Development Team
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection
• MP3 Player & One Year Subscription to Rhapsody Music Service

Making The Wildcard - Finalist

• One night trip for one to New York City
• “Pitch Session” with MTV Networks Product Development Team
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection
• MP3 Player & One Year Subscription to Rhapsody Music Service

Full details for the contest and registration can be found on the MTV contest webpage.

A case study of the Lombardi Blueprint process mapping tool was recently posted to the GWT
developer blog:

Blueprint is a multi-thousand line Web 2.0 application that developed over the last year or so. After trying and abandoning Flash and Dojo based versions of the app, we settled on GWT for its far superior ease of debugging, code size, and execution speed. The refactoring support we get from being able to code in Java and use IntelliJ/Eclipse made it a slam dunk.

The challenge handed to us was to create a tool that the average business user could use to document and manage their business processes. It had to be easy to use, encourage collaboration between team members, and provide a shared repository for all of a company’s process documentation. Workflow functionality had to be on par with our competitors: Microsoft Visio, IDS Scheer’s ARIS, IBM’s WebSphere Business Modeler, and other desktop modeling tools. But we also wanted wiki & shared whiteboard capabilities to store information. Editing should use the drag and drop interaction users of desktop apps are familiar with.

The case study has details on the full experience building the application, which you can see in action here:

Sergey Ilinsky has cursive up an article on an XMLHttpRequest feat wrapper that provides an coequal XHR country crossways the different browsers.

If you ingest the cloak you crapper mend things like:

• Internet Explorer: module revealing in XMLHttpRequest
• Gecko: absent readystatechange calls in coetaneous requests
• Gecko: extra readystatechange DONE when letter aborted
• Gecko: Annoying <parsererror…>…</parsererror> documents
• Internet Explorer + Gecko: replicate readystatechange OPEN triggered

As conception of his impact Sergey compared the application implementations:

And has prefabricated his cipher available for download.