In the rush to develop entirely new Web 2.0 systems based on Ajax, it is often easy to lose sight of how it can be used to improve the so-called “legacy” enterprise systems. Over at the Ext JS blog, there’s a post about German developer who put together a reporting/BI application to front-end RPG code running on an AS400.
The backend serves up JSON data (together with this old article about reskinning a Spring MVC application with Tibco GI, it makes for a solid approach for refactoring existing webapps) to the Ext JS/Flash front-end. Slick. You can view a demo (unfortunately in German for you non-German speakers) here.
The debate on ECMAScript Edition 4 / JavaScript 2 continues with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, posting an open letter to Chris Wilson, Lead Architect for Internet Explorer. This is largely a restatement of the mailing list posting we covered earlier, but contains a more organized and formal rebuttal to some of the ES4 / JS2 critics that have been flying around recently.
Here’s hoping engineering concerns triumph over politics. The parties concerned read stories and comments on Ajaxian, so post comments on this story to make your voice heard.
For developers, having an API acquirable to admittance aggregation from your selection place is a beatific thing. It’s not ever necessary, though, as shown by faith Heilmann in his stylish post. faith walks us finished the impact of creating a Slideshare room using a ultimate RSS feed to clutch the data:
When I patterned my slides I had a countenance at the API of slideshare but I am ever a taste tired with having to go finished a developer ID and then do everything on the server. That’s ground I place on my “ethical hacker” headgear and took a countenance at the RSS take of my slides and institute everything I requirement there! If you countenance at the maker of the take you’ll wager that it contains not exclusive the titles and descriptions but also the media code, in this housing the HTML to embed the correct winkle movies.
The pleasant abstract most this tutorial is that faith explains how to attain the room retiring so that it degrades right should JavaScript be disabled:
When JavaScript is acquirable this module be the countenance and wager and functionality. When JS is overturned soured every you’ll intend is an unstyled itemize of course pointing to the presentations on slideshare.net.
This is a site about technology for developers, so I won't get into any politics on OpenSocial and Facebook. There is already more coverage on that than you could want to read.
How is a social API interesting to Ajax developers? The main interface to the social data is through JavaScript. You can also use REST to hit the endpoints themselves, but the JavaScript API is very much the first class citizen.
If you are used to the Google Gadgets API you will probably be most familiar. Social components just have to include a one liner to their ModulePrefs:
Kris Zyp gave some great presentations at The Ajax Experience including a discussion on advanced JSON. He did most of his demonstrations of JSON interaction using a Firefox extension that he developed himself called RESTTest.
There were some requests after the presentation that he make the extension available to the public to aid in Ajax development. He has done just that.
RESTTest allows you to construct custom HTTP requests to directly test requests against a server. RESTTest uses the XmlHttpRequest object and allows you to simulate XHR to quickly prototype requests and test security problems. It is designed specifically for working with REST sources, supporting all HTTP methods, and allows you to issue HTTP requests with your headers and data and examine the results to test REST sources.
We got our first look at a rewritten Tiny MCE 3 today.
From a pure feature point of view, this release might not be very impressive, but if you are interested in JavaScript and do a lot of custom development, this is the release you have been waiting for. One of the main focuses for the new 3.x branch is to produce a more powerful API and also make it output valid XHTML code by default.
Some of the more notable changes are:
Rewrote the core and most of the plugins and themes from scratch.
Reduced the over all script size by 33% and the number of files/requests by 75% so it loads a lot faster.
Added new and improved serialization engine, faster and more powerful.
Added new inlinepopups plugin, the dialogs are now skinnable and uses clearlooks2 as default.
Added new contextmenu plugin, context menus can now have submenus and plugins can add items on the fly.
Added new skin support for the simple and advanced themes you can alter the whole UI using CSS.
Added new o2k7 skin for the simple and advanced themes.
Added new JSON parser/serializer and JSON-RPC class to the core API.
Added new cookie utility class to the core API.
Added new Unit testing class to the core API only available in dev mode.
Added new Safari plugin, fixes lots compatibility of issues with Safari 3.x.
Added new on demand loading of plugins and themes. Enables you to load and init TinyMCE at any time.
Added new unit tests in the dev package of TinyMCE. Runs tests on the core API, commands and settings of the editor.
Removed all button images and replaced them with CSS sprite images. Reduces the number of requests needed.
Removed lots of language files and merged them into the base language files. Reduces the number of requests needed.
Removed lots of unnecessary files and merged many of them together to reduce requests and improve loading speed.
Fixed so convert_fonts_to_spans are enabled by default. So no more font tags.
Fixed so all classes from @import stylesheets gets imported into the editor.
