Can JavaScript performance become a big selling point for browser acceptance? That’s what Jeff Atwood is speculating as he put several browsers through the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. The tests evaluate the performance of a browser’s implementation of JS language only and claims to be a real world, balanced and statistically sound testing suite.
Jeff put IE 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9.5 & Safari 3.0.4 through the benchmark to determine who had the best performance.
Image from Jeff Atwood’s posting.
What surprised me here is that Firefox is substantially slower than IE, once you factor out that wildly anomalous string result. I had to use a beta version of Opera to get something other than invalid (NaN) results for this benchmark, which coincidentally summarizes my opinion of Opera. Great when it works! I expected Opera to do well; it was handily winning JavaScript benchmarks way back in 2005. The new kid on the block, Safari, shows extremely well particularly considering that it is running outside its native OS X environment. Kudos to Apple. Well, except for that whole font thing.
When the news broke that DWR had joined the Dojo Foundation, it left a lot of questions regarding the future of the DWR framework. Joe Walker aims to address the future of DWR in his recent post, DWR: State of the Union.
So DWR is now part of the Dojo Foundation. I thought it would be good to quickly summarize where we are, and what I’m working on, and to give everyone a chance to comment.
DWR 2.0 has been out for 6 months or so. At the time, I swore that the next release would be a small one, called 2.1. However it appears that I’m not good at swearing because there is lots in the next release - I think we’re going to have to call it 3.0.
The next release of DWR looks feature rich adding enhanced JSON support and Gears integration among other things.
I had an 11 hour flight from London to SFO. What was I going to do? I had a couple of books with me. The in-flight movies were average, and even in business class they didn't have the on-demand system, so if you missed the start you had to wait for the next go around. I poked around in a DVD store and couldn't find anything to interest me, so I ended up grabbing 'Heroes' since I had never seen it. I was put off by the "Save the cheerleader, save the world" commercials, but figured if it was half decent then there was a lot of material (e.g. time) to cover.
So, I popped in the DVD, and whilst I watched, I opened up Firefox and Textmate.
I have been wanting to play around with the new Ext 2.0 release, and also with the GWT-Ext package. Unfortunately, that module isn't using Ext 2.0 quite yet (almost!), so I decided to do a first rev of the tool with straight Ext 2.
I found the new Google Chart API to be a little addicting, and some people have asked if there was a tool for people to create charts, instead of having to munge with URLs.
A common use case is to dynamically generate the charts on the fly, and then it makes sense to just build the URls and you are done. But, what if you wanted to sit back and just throw out a chart or two?
The tool has you fill out core information about the graph or chart that you want to create (e.g. size and title), you then choose the type of chart in the tabs, and you fill out the data needed for that type of chart. You can click on the "seed data" button to see sample data, and when you are done tweaking it, you click on "GET CHART". That action causes a preview to be loaded below, and you get given the URL in a text box that you can copy and paste.
It is a little rough around the edges in that I wanted to let you tab though fields and have an easy way to add rows of data (instead of just using a crude textarea). I also need to make it so that all of the data can be expressed through the UI (e.g. marker types, colors, fills, etc) which isn't the case now.
I really enjoyed Ext 2. They did a great job, and with more documentation and such to come, I think it is a great library for building these desktop-like environments.
Then each section used the "region" metadata to tell the system where to place it. You are also able to do things like tell the system you can be moved around, collapsible, and more.
So, the result of a few hours with Ext 2 with no access to the online docs and you get this:
Yup, that’s RTM in there! Remember The Milk for Gmail is a Firefox extension that lets you do every kinds of disturbed modify things with your tasks (and interacts with your mail, contacts, and calendar too).
It goes beyond letting you control your tasks, as you crapper enter tasks with your mail, google calendar, and contacts.
With all of the press surrounding Adobe AIR, I'm sure many of you have been chomping at the bit to give it a go. Jonathan Snook shows you how in his tutorial, Christmas Is In The AIR. AIR is Adobe's answer to leveraging existing web technologies for building desktop applications and it's a cool bit of technology. Jonathan walks you through all of the basic steps of setting up your development environment for the AIR SDK, explaining the file dependencies and discussing AIR's Sandbox Security model. One of the coolest parts of the tutorial, though, is when he shows how to store data via the AIR API:
You’ve essentially got 4 different ways that you can store data:
Using the local database. AIR comes with SQLLite built in. That means you can create tables and insert, update and select data from that database just like on a web server.
Using the file system. You can also create files on the local machine. You have access to a few folders on the local system such as the documents folder and the desktop.
Using EcryptedLocalStore. I like using the EcryptedLocalStore because it allows you to easily save key/value pairs and have that information encrypted. All this within just a couple lines of code.
To demonstrate some persistence, we’ll use the file system to store our files. In addition, we’ll let the user specify where the file should be saved. This way, we can create multiple to-do lists, keeping them separate and organized.
The application is now broken down into 4 basic tasks:
Load data from the file system.
Perform any interface bindings.
Manage creating and deleting items from the list.
Save any changes to the list back to the file system.
This tutorial is really a good read and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a headstart with Adobe AIR.
Christian Effenberger has doubled up to release Mapper.js 1.0, a library that allows you to add automatic area highlighting to image maps
on webpages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep the code clean.
It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+,
Safari and IE6+. On older browsers, it can use "jsgraphics" from
Walter Zorn (if installed), else it'll degrade and visitors won't
notice a thing.
You are able to create an image map, and then define the colors through the simple CSS class microformat:
