Web Info & Tutorials

"What we have seen over the last few weeks is that the U.S. problem is not only the U.S.'s problem. It's extended to all around the world and hurting all countries and all banking systems."

Disappointing bank results, general worries over the U.S. economy and retreating commodities sent Toronto stock investors fleeing for the exits on Tuesday. via Sympatico Finance

Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and - even more importantly - developing applications for it. This is FireEagle:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user’s location? Or, maybe you’ve found a way to capture someone’s location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Once you got in you’ll be able to download development kits in several languages including PHP, Python, Ruby and of course JavaScript. All the API calls are REST and the API authentication is handled via OAuth. The output format is either XML or JSON. The code is licensed with BSD and you can even contribute to the FireEagle source at a code repository.

The available API calls are:

user

Returns the location of a specific user in a location hierarchy format.

recent

Returns a list of users of the application who have updated their location within the given amount of time.

within

Takes a Place ID or a WoE ID and returns a list of users using your application who are within the bounding box of that location.

update

Sets a user’s current location using using a Place ID hash or a set of location parameters. If the user provides a location unconfirmed with lookup method then Fire Eagle makes a best guess as to the user’s location and updates.

lookup

Disambiguates potential values for update. Results from lookup can be passed to update to ensure that Fire Eagle will understand how to parse the location parameter.

You can learn more by watching the video of Tom explaining FireEagle at ETech.

The uses for a service like this are endless. From sensible search applications that show you places of interest nearby your current location up to real-life games of high-tech hide and seek everything is possible.

"I don't think that you have to rush to take advantage of those opportunities in the U.S."

The move, which follows a shuffle in senior management, came as chief executive officer Bill Downe acknowledged that the bank must change the way it handles some of its businesses. via The Globe and Mail

Me.dium, the social browsing folks, have put together some examples using the new Activities and Web Slices features.

You can install their Activity if you have IE 8, or you can take a look below:

As part of Activities,
Me.dium now offers a powerful “Social Discovery” Activity from any page. Me.dium’s “Discover” Activity gives you recommendations, related to a page or selected key words, which are influenced by the real time surfing activity of all Me.dium users. Me.dium also displays a “real-time map” of user activity on the pages related to the selected text, page, or link so users can see how popular those pages are with Me.dium users in real time.

This is their XML file.

Are you excited about activities or any other IE 8 new features? Or are you the kind of guy that is just happen that the darn 2 connection limit is 6?

John Lam has posted about a new release, DSL: Dynamic Silverlight. I can't believe that Microsoft is going to take the DSL TLA ;)

Our team is happy to announce Dynamic Silverlight (DSL), which integrates our DLR dynamic languages with Silverlight. It requires Silverlight 2, which includes the cross-platform CLR and a set of libraries for rich graphics, media and web programming. It is packaged as a Silverlight extension, which means that it is downloaded in addition to Silverlight on an as-needed basis.

DSL has a runtime and an SDK component. The runtime consists of two assemblies: Microsoft.Scripting.dll, and Microsoft.Scripting.Silverlight.dll. You'll also need the language assemblies, which are IronRuby.dll and IronRuby.Libraries.dll for Ruby and IronPython.dll and IronPython.Modules.dll for Python. The runtime component is a small additional download. Today, the IronRuby Silverlight runtime is just a 712KB download, which takes less than 5 seconds to download over modern broadband.

Now you can get Ruby in your browser:

John also talked about Chiron, a mini Web server that lets you develop against a local file system with ease. We will find out more, and get access to the bits, on Friday when John gives his MIX talk.

MIX has started, and we have the news we have been waiting for, for some time. What is IE 8 going to do?

Microsoft has put out an IE 8 Readiness Report that discusses everything.

There is a TON of amazing stuff here. It also looks like they will be using the standards for most of this stuff, but we need to see more. E.g. is cross domain messaging using postMessage?

But, having 6 connections per host and the like is huge:

Ajax Improvements

A white paper is here:

1. AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back
   and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used
   navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation.
   This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like
   the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an
   event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in
   the travel log.
2. DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for
   storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be
   stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local
   machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which
   reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access
   to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For
   example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity
   event to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer
   is offline.
3. Connectivity events allow websites to check
   when the user is connected to the network and receive notification
   of connectivity changes.
4. Six connections per host instead of two for
   broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more
   improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in
   Internet Explorer 8. In addition, this increases functionality by
   ensuring a request is not blocked to a host if two connections
   already exist. Websites can optimize their downloads based on a
   scriptable property.
5. XMLHTTPRequest Enhancements include a timeout
   property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary,
   allowing developers to manage the request better.

Cross domain is here:

• With Cross-domain Request (XDR), developers can
  create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the
  XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this
  request, called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous
  requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making
  their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have
  you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data
  aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure
  and fast.
• Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow
  communication between documents from different domains through
  IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.

HTML and CSS

• CSS 2.1 Compliance
• Data URI Support
• Better CSS printing
• CSS Selector API support
• Acid2 support
• Better DOM Core support

New Features

• Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any Web page. Users typically copy and paste from one Web page to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
• WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

And we also have other features such as less memory leaks!

What do you think?

Joe Walker tipped me off to a preview of iWebMvc which is meta framework that ties together DWR, Dojo, Spring and Hibernate/JPA a la AppFuse or Grails.

It is created by Jose Noheda, a DWR commiter, and the project aims are:

• Is based on Java
  
  Although supporting Grooy / JRuby is a plus
• Helps me to kick start a project
  
  But simplifying the process by giving me the best (and this can be tricky) set of frameworks for each task
• Integrates both server and client sides
  
  And it's lightweight, robust and extensible. Read enterprise quality.
• Supports all the common tasks a web app has to handle
  
  I include here: User Management, CRUD operations, i18n support (both framework & data), AJAX and astounding visuals

Financially harassed stuff President Homes sued the parent consort of diplomatist Bank for $100 meg Tuesday, charging that Harris, on behalf of individual another lenders, prefabricated business errors that pushed the South Barrington-based consort into insolvency.

The meet charges that the Bank of metropolis , Harris’ parent, miscalculated the turn of assets acquirable to Kennedy, feat the stuff to overdraw its distinction of assign by more than $11 million.

In constituent to accusing the Bank of metropolis of severance of holding obligation and negligence, the meet says the slope also sworn humbug and ‘intentionally prefabricated dirty and simulated statements of touchable fact’ after President had upraised questions most the formulas utilised to watch the company’s acquirable funds. Read more

Christopher Lenz has been outlay instance on the CouchDB project. He got lulled over when CouchDB went to JSON.

He talks most how “CouchDB is pretty substantially positioned for storing and querying XML accumulation in constituent to JSON” via the E4X hold that it gets discover of the incase as it uses SpiderMonkey.

To be fair, this is already doable if you ingest another analyse servers (such as the Ruby or Python ones), where you also hit admittance to the XML hold provided by the individual accepted libraries. Given CouchDB’s incremental analyse update model, you commonly don’t tending so such most the action of analyse functions as you tending most the accumulation it produces. So if your analyse duty crapper someways parse the XML and place whatever accumulation into the analyse index, that’s commonly every you need. Actually querying the analyse is feat to be rattling fast.

But E4X is an exceptionally favourable API for XML. I conceive using E4X is feat to be a pretty beatific move for those who poverty to to CouchDB to accumulation and ask XML content.

"In light of market changes, it is now clear that our position grew beyond what was in line for our risk tolerance and strategic direction"

Bank of Montreal's first-quarter earnings fell a steeper-than-expected 27 percent, hurt by a double-whammy of capital market-related writedowns and soaring provisions for bad loans. via Globeinvestor.com