Web Info & Tutorials

Yahoo! Search does an interesting bit of caching. To see it in action, go to the main search page with Firebug enabled and ready (or any tool that lets you see network traffic). Then type any character into the search input box and you will see some traffic kick off to download items such as:

http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/s3/ysch_srp_clean_200711061918.css
http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/el/att_hdspr_1.6t.png
http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/s3/ysch_srp_clean_200711051714.js
http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/gr2/sprt_srp_core_6.gif
http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/el/ng_bg.png

What are these files? They are artifacts for the results page. So, Yahoo! groks that you obviously are going to do a search once you start to type something in, so why not go ahead and preload the files that are needed as part of the results page? Nicely done.

Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall are putting on a conference dedicated to GWT on December 3-6 in San Francisco.

Meet and learn from the folks, both Google engineers and community members, who have developed GWT. Speakers will share their experiences in building real-world applications with GWT. Speakers include many of the GWT team members, including Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber. They will be joined by Billy Hoffman, Jeet Kaul, Josh Bloch, David Geary, and other members of the GWT community.

Introductory Topics

• Getting started with GWT
• Solving traditional web usability problems with AJAX and GWT
• Building user interfaces
• Client/server communication, including RPC, JSON, and XML
• Integration and interoperation with existing applications and libraries
• Unit testing and benchmarking
• Deploying GWT applications effectively

Advanced Topics

• Advanced UI programming: Widgets, Panels, DOM, and JSNI
• Using deferred binding for dependency injection and code generation
• Designing for no-compromise usability, including tips for maximizing responsiveness, supporting history, and internationalizing well
• Maximizing code reuse
• Understanding compilation, the JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI), and optimizations
• Security considerations for AJAX and GWT
• Architecting big applications with GWT

Network with colleagues and GWT team members to discuss the underlying promise of GWT as well as its current challenges:

• How can I integrate GWT into my existing application?
• How have others added functionality to GWT?
• How can one best take advantage of Java
  design patterns in GWT?
• For large projects, how can we handle multiple entry points?
• What are the best practices for debugging
  GWT applications?
• Which IDEs work best with GWT?
• How have others integrated Spring and Hibernate?
• How can you contribute to the Google Web Toolkit project?

To whet your appetite they put together a couple of interviews with the founders of GWT that are worth a lesson:

• Bruce Johnson
• Joel Webber

With the OS X push of 10.5.1 and 10.4.11, and a new Safari/Win beta, we see the latest and greatest of WebKit in Safari itself.

To kick this off, Maciej Stachowiak has blogged 10 new things in WebKit 3:

• Enhanced Rich Text Editing: And RTE needs help!
• Faster JavaScript and DOM: ~2 times faster
• Faster Page Loading: WebKit 3 is 1.4 times as fast
• SVG: Yay
• XPath: Yay
• New and Improved XML Technologies: XSLTProcessor, DOMParser, XMLSerializer, a better XHR (”incremental updates for persistent server connections”)
• Styleable Form Controls: No more native
• Advanced CSS Styling: Text-stroke, text-shadow, and more
• Reduced Memory Use: WebKit 3 uses 14% less memory
• Web Developer Tools: Web Inspector, Drosera

Game weekday is here, and it was instance to background a Silverlight one. This instance we hit a Silverlight 1.1 edition of Minesweeper, with flooded source code to analyse out.

Where is Silver Scrabulous?