Higher commodity stocks yielded a slight gain on the Toronto stock market Tuesday morning after the Bank of Canada responded to a deepening slowdown by cutting its key interest rate. via CBC News
SNOOK LIVE CHAT TOMORROW (3/5/08)
Jonathan Snook will be conducting a live chat tomorrow (3/5/08) at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT) via UStream. Here are the details:
- Location: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/snookca
- Date/Time: 3/5/08 at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT)
- Topic: Q&A relating to Jonathan’s development work with Adobe AIR, and questions regarding JavaScript, frameworks (PHP or JavaScript), or about freelancing.
This is definitely a good opportunity to pick the brain of one of the top professionals around.
GOOGLE GEARS FOR MOBILE RELEASED
I have seen the huge batches of cell phones that companies keep around to test their applications on. Companies like UI Evolution have come along to try to help out the madness of getting something that works across more than a couple of them.
Not only do you have the problems of handsets, but you also have the network lock-downs and the hoops you have to go through to get an application onto a large set of devices.
Since the iPhone, I have strongly believed that history is going to repeat itself, and the Web is going to win on the mobile.
Enough rambling, Google has just released Google Gears for Mobile:
Today we’re announcing the launch of Google Gears for mobile, a mobile browser extension for creating rich web applications for mobile devices. The first version is now available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6. It’s a fully functional port of Google Gears v0.2 that can be used to develop offline capability into your mobile web applications. You can also create slick and responsive applications by hiding latency issues through controlled caching of data and storage of information between sessions. We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers.
There are already a handful of Windows Mobile web apps that use Google Gears for mobile, such as the social payment service Buxfer and online applications provider Zoho. Read more about these applications and how they use Google Gears for mobile on the Google mobile blog.
I got to fly back home to London to talk to members of the mobile team. Below is an interview with a couple of the engineers, and there is also a high level look at the news:
I am really excited about what this means for the future of mobile development. I want to be able to develop applications using Ajax on the phone, and see tools like Gears give me access to native APIs on those devices. I really hope that the iPhone SDK also offers more on the JavaScript API side too (as well as Cocoa). How nice would it be to take your iPhone app and finally get some onPinch goodness, and camera.takePhoto.
UPDATE: Wow, it is a mobile day, Nokia talks about plans for Silverlight
AJAXIAN FEATURED TUTORIAL: SIMPLE SAVE MESSAGE USING MOOTOOLS
It's been awhile since we've put up an Ajaxian Featured Tutorial and so we're going to get back into the swing of things with a nice, simple tutorial using MooTools.
Giving users feedback during a "save" process is a very good idea. It allows the user to feel a sense of confidence that the site is responding and their data is being processed. While we're at it, why not make it look good as well? Antonio Lupetti has written a short tutorial which does just that.
My friend David asked to me how to implement a message box which appears when an user submit a form and disappear (with a nice fade effect after some seconds) when a generic Ajax request is completed.
In the image below, Antonio has described the sequence of effects:
To break it down, when the user submits the form, a message box will appear first giving the user an indicator that the save is in progress followed by a message to let them know that the save process has completed. The fade-out effect is very cool window dressing.
Antonio leveraged the MooTools JavaScript library for this tutorial which, apart from making the code a trivial task, already includes their "fx" module which makes adding nice effects very easy.
JAVASCRIPT:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('domready', function(){
var box = $('box');
var fx = box.effects({duration: 1000, transition: Fx.Transitions.Quart.easeOut});
window.addEvent('domready', function(){
var box = $('box');
var fx = box.effects({duration: 1000, transition: Fx.Transitions.Quart.easeOut});
$('save_button').addEvent('click', function() {
box.style.display="block";
box.setHTML('Save in progress...');
/* AJAX Request here... */
fx.start({
}).chain(function() {
box.setHTML('Saved!');
this.start.delay(1000, this, {'opacity' : 0});
}).chain(function() {
box.style.display="none";
this.start.delay(0100, this, {'opacity' : 1});
});
});
});
</script>
Antonio has created a demo to show off the results.
DOJO AND DJANGO TEMPLATES ON THE SERVER SIDE WITH JAXER
Yesterday we posted about Dojo and AIR and how the framework could be well suited for certain desktop applications.
Today we have Kriz Zyp talking about their Jaxer support and how you can use the Django template language, that Dojo recently added, to once again do its thing on the server side.
Kris tells us more:
HTML:
Once this is done, Dojo should load in Jaxer, and you can utilize the library capabilities of the Dojo Toolkit on the server side. In particular, you can now use the DTL renderer as you would on the browser. The DTL renderer can take templates written using Django template language and render the templates based upon JSON data. If you are running Jaxer, you can view a demonstration of DTL rendering on the server by loading /dojox/dtl/demos/demo_Templated_Jaxer.html (make sure the Dojo Toolkit base URL is correct).
By using Jaxer’s capability to allow scripts to execute on both the client and server, we can utilize our Dojo Toolkit in both environments. On the server we can utilize many of the Dojo Toolkit’s features such as functional language features, math libraries, cryptography, dates, encoding, and more to improve development speed and code quality. We can use the same powerful features and idioms in both the browser and the server. An example of a practical way to use the Dojo Toolkit in both environments is to utilize the DTL renderer as described above to generate HTML on the server, and then use the Dojo Toolkit’s Ajax capabilities to dynamically update the page once it’s on the browser. For example: we could use the DTL renderer to display the comments in a blog, dynamically add any new comment the user makes at the end of the list of comments, and then send the comment to the server using Ajax.
It is important to note that Jaxer is not capable of transferring the programatically set event handlers for widgets—it can only send the static HTML to the browser. This means you can use DTL as a templating engine to create HTML on the server, but the Dojo Toolkit client side widgets are still necessary if you want to use interactive widgets on the browser.
ACID 3 SHIPS; WEBKIT PRAISED
Jon Tan ran a few tests and posted the results. Hixie commented on his blog about the release, and praised WebKit on how they have been closing a large number of bugs:
I have to say straight up that I've been really impressed with the WebKit team. Even before the test was finished, they were actively following up every single bug the test showed. Safari 3 (the last released version) scores 39/100 with bad rendering errors. At the start of last month their nightly builds were scoring about 60/100 with serious rendering errors. Now barely a month later the nightly builds are already up to 87/100 and most of the rendering errors are fixed. That's a serious testament to their commitment to standards.
So, the results that we know of are:
- Firefox 2.0.0.12: 50%
- Firefox 3.0b3: 61%
- Opera 9.26: 46%
- Safari 3.0.4: 39%
- WebKit Nightly: 87%
The real key though... IE 8? :)
Oh, and take some time to view source on the test itself and enjoy some of the fun JavaScript:
JAVASCRIPT:
function () {
// test 11: Ranges and Comments
var msg;
var doc = getTestDocument();
var c1 = doc.createComment("11111");
doc.appendChild(c1);
var r = doc.createRange();
r.selectNode(c1);
msg = 'wrong exception raised';
try {
r.surroundContents(doc.createElement('a'));
msg = 'no exception raised';
} catch (e) {
if ('code' in e)
msg += '; code = ' + e.code;
if (e.code == 3)
msg = '';
}
assert(msg == '', "when inserting <a> into Document with another child: " + msg);
var c2 = doc.createComment("22222");
doc.body.appendChild(c2);
var c3 = doc.createComment("33333");
doc.body.appendChild(c3);
r.setStart(c2, 2);
r.setEnd(c3, 3);
var msg = 'wrong exception raised';
try {
r.surroundContents(doc.createElement('a'));
msg = 'no exception raised';
} catch (e) {
if ('code' in e)
msg += '; code = ' + e.code;
if (e.code == 1)
msg = '';
}
assert(msg == '', "when trying to surround two halves of comment: " + msg);
assertEquals(r.toString(), "", "comments returned text");
return 1;
}
// test 11: Ranges and Comments
var msg;
var doc = getTestDocument();
var c1 = doc.createComment("11111");
doc.appendChild(c1);
var r = doc.createRange();
r.selectNode(c1);
msg = 'wrong exception raised';
try {
r.surroundContents(doc.createElement('a'));
msg = 'no exception raised';
} catch (e) {
if ('code' in e)
msg += '; code = ' + e.code;
if (e.code == 3)
msg = '';
}
assert(msg == '', "when inserting <a> into Document with another child: " + msg);
var c2 = doc.createComment("22222");
doc.body.appendChild(c2);
var c3 = doc.createComment("33333");
doc.body.appendChild(c3);
r.setStart(c2, 2);
r.setEnd(c3, 3);
var msg = 'wrong exception raised';
try {
r.surroundContents(doc.createElement('a'));
msg = 'no exception raised';
} catch (e) {
if ('code' in e)
msg += '; code = ' + e.code;
if (e.code == 1)
msg = '';
}
assert(msg == '', "when trying to surround two halves of comment: " + msg);
assertEquals(r.toString(), "", "comments returned text");
return 1;
}
SILVERLIGHT OFFLINE AND AIR
A pair of articles from the advise came discover at the aforementioned time. Darryl sculpturer reportable on his conversation with Kevin Lynch and histrion LaMonica publicised Microsoft to verify Silverlight offline eventually.
The crossing is where Kevin answers most Silverlight feat offline:
Well, what most an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it?
In visit to do it well, your hunch has to be in it. And if you countenance at what we’re doing correct today with our technologies aforementioned Flash and AIR, we’re making trusty they impact reliably crossways operative systems. So that effectuation Mac and Windows, but also Linux. We’re emotional Flash Player today simultaneous for Mac and Windows. It took us a patch to intend their and today we’re doing that, and it’s the aforementioned set code.
If you countenance at what Microsoft is doing with Silverlight, they’re not actually antiquity the UNIX edition soured the aforementioned cipher base. It’s a newborn cipher base, which is implausible to be harmonious with the another cipher bases because it’s meet not shapely the aforementioned way. So there’ll be assorted idiosyncrasies and we undergo that module be a problem. So we’re rattling attractive a aroused move to reliability crossways OSes. And you rattling hit to hit that as the set gist of what you’re doing or it won’t rattling impact that well.
Microsoft says it is coming:
Microsoft does not currently hit limited plans to alter offline capabilities to Silverlight, but it’s something it module yet do, said Evangelist Case, generalized trainer in Microsoft’s developer division.
“It’s something that we module poverty to do,” Case said in an discourse on Monday. “Eventually, customers module wait us to do it.”
Darryl has a aggregation more meat in his article which asks:
- As farther as AIR deployment, ground not meet place it in Flash?
- But isn’t the Flash Player exclusive most a 500K download? Couldn’t you meet up that a little, as you said bandwidth is increasing?
- When are you thinking to, or are you in fact thinking to, open-source Flash?
- So you said Tamarin was a prototypal step. Does that stingy you’re feat to do a second, third, ordinal travel and so on until Flash is full unstoppered source?
- I’ve watched this current rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft. What do you conceive they requirement to do if they poverty to one-up AIR?
- Well, what most an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it?
- So how do you come the criticisms most section with AIR?
- You mentioned hold for UNIX with AIR. Can you modify on the grandness of UNIX for you guys and where you’re headlike with it?
- Who is meliorate at designer/developer workflow, Microsoft or Adobe? Do you grant that to them?
- What’s the position of the Adobe relation with Google most Google Gears?
- Do you hit some plans to do an AIR-based browser?
NOTE: I had a pair of opinions on the supply of open maker wrt Gears and AIR