Ajax Girl

Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complimenting it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.

During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.

When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web - in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.

The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.

The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB - which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.

Multimedia
A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia - particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.

As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.

Services
The same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage - the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.

Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone - so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well - thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.

What is next..
In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software - and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.

Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident - so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched - but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).

To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at www.silverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.

Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113229315/

Google’s personalized home page, Google IG, has been rebranded as iGoogle and will relaunch tomorrow at igoogle.com. A number of bloggers were brought in to Google HQ today and are reporting the details.

iGoogle is Google’s entrant into the crowded customizable Ajax home page space, where My Yahoo is the clear leader with over 50 million monthly unique visitors. iGoogle currently has just over 7 million monthly unique visitors.

But Google has never promoted iGoogle, and it has a number of superior features to MyYahoo. The most important is that Google’s personalized home page supports widgets (they call them gadgets). Yahoo has stubbornly refused to integrate the My Yahoo property with their Konfabulator widgets platform. Through Google widgets, users can bring Gmail, Gtalk and other services right to their home page. Finally, Google allows users to customize the template of iGoogle - they say that 30% of users choose to do this.

Google is now offering a “personalized home” link on their main home page, which will drive significant numbers of new users to the site. Look out, Yahoo.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113229829/

As you can see with the embedded Flash widget above, eBay is now letting users embed information about any listing or group of listings directly into a website. Their hope is to encourage bloggers and social network users who discuss famous listings to embed the information right into the page. The service will be available at togo.ebay.com this morning.

There are three types of widgets. Example of all three can be seen on this test blog set up by eBay. The first, embedded above, shows information on a single listing. users can mouse over the seller to get additional information, or do a search with the results returned within the widget itself. Users can also clone the widget for their own site. There is no requirement that the person creating the widget be the seller of the item.

The second type of widget shows up to ten separate items. The pictures rotate in a slide show, and when a viewer clicks on one, it replaces the slideshow with information about that item in the same format as the first widget. The third type of widget shows picture results based on a search query. Like the second widget, clicking on any picture shows information about that listing.

These widgets are just for fun and to generate discussion around interesting auctions, not for revenue generation by publishers. Ebay provides affiliate tools at affiliates.ebay.com and the company says that they will evolve those tools separately over time to meet the requests of affiliates. See our recent post on AuctionAds (one of our current sponsors) for eBay listing widgets that pay out affiliate fees.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113116991/

SplashCast, an embeddable Flash media player, is improving its product today. They are now allowing publishers to turn any RSS feed with a media enclosure, such as a podcast or videocast, into a channel on their player. Previously SplashCast only allowed RSS feeds from YouTube and Flickr. Now, any feed can be added.

The best way to understand SplashCast is just to look at the player, which we’ve embedded below. Feeds are organized into channels, making it possible to show your favorite videos, podcasts, and photos from within one player updated through RSS. SplashCast will continuously update the shows on the channel as new content is added.

Text based RSS feeds have had several multi-channel embeddable widget based platforms, including Grazr and SpringWidgets. Multi-channel video and audio RSS feeds are a smaller category, mostly consisting of widgets that play only your own content. Along with SplashCast, Cozmo.tv has been helping develop multi-channel video players updated via RSS, but only for social video sites YouTube and Blip.tv.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113108553/

A mini book deserves a mini review, and so it is with the “Digital Shortcut” from January 2007 entitled Google™ Web Toolkit Solutions (Digital Short Cut): Cool & Useful Stuff. The 112 page PDF goes further than any of the free tutorials out there in that it develops two non-trivial applications using GWT: a Yahoo! Trips app that uses proxied Yahoo web services, and an Address Book, that makes use of Hibernate persistence through RPC.

The applications are non-trivial in that they tackle complex use cases, backend processing, web service, backend persistence and the integration of third party Javascript frameworks — all aspects of GWT application development that are of great interest to serious developers. (Source code available for download.) In order, the chapters cover the following:

1. Chapter 1 covers what must already be fairly familiar to most GWT developers — making an RPC call to a backend servlet. This chapter, however, does an exceptionally good job of explaining the why and how of GWT RPC in exhaustive detail. The Yahoo Trips application is used to illustrate how to proxy an RSS feed.
2. Chapter 2 shows how to integrate third party Javascript libraries with GWT. In this case Scriptaculous is used to provide an effect in the Yahoo Trips application to the panel containing the search results. The chapter focuses on two ways to incorporate scripts in the app — simply including script tags in the application html file, and GWT script injection, i.e. through the GWT config file.
3. Chapter 3 shows one way of how to implement drag and drop with GWT, using a fairly OO approach. The code seems pretty reusable and useful. Again, the Yahoo! Trips app is used.
4. Chapter 4 shows how to bring GWT into the mix. Most of it is old hat for experienced Hibernate hands, but the example does work through implementing a sort of remote DAO using the GWT RPC. It’s always good to see how that is done, even if it looks simple on paper. The Address Book app is used for this example.
5. Chapter 5 shows how to use ant to deploy your apps to Tomcat. I assume most everyone is using Googlipse or some non-free alternative, but writing ant files for automated build environments is still a useful thing to know.
6. Chapter 6 illustrates the use of popups and “deferred commands.” Popups are obvious (modal and modeless dialogs); deferred commands are a way of giving focus to widgets that have not yet been displayed. I really haven’t seen good treatment of this aspect of GWT programming elsewhere. Uses the Address Book app for this example.

Over all, the book doesn’t skimp on explanations and code samples and is written in a clear style. It doesn’t address unit testing with JUnit, but I suppose you can get that information elsewhere. For those of you who like to learn by doing, this is a decent tutorial (and worth the $10 price tag) that can tide you over until the bigger GWT tomes come out.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mini-review-google-web-toolkit-solutions-cool-useful-stuff

I recently decided to upgrade my cookware. I asked a friend of mine who’s a chef for recommendations. Here’s what she had to say:

I like All-Clad stainless, I’ve had good luck with it.

I also have some copper cookware that Williams Sonoma got from a French company, but I don’t believe they carry that exact brand anymore. Copper conducts heat really wonderfully; it gets a patina which some people don’t like, but I don’t mind. I never polish it and I don’t think that affects its performance.

I dream of also owning some Le Creuset cookware, at least a Dutch oven to make braised meats and stews.

Calphalon is a brand people like a lot, too, but I haven’t personally worked much with it.

Re: nonstick, it won’t hurt to have one nonstick pan for certain uses, but keep in mind the lifespan of nonstick is not very long because the nonstick surface gradually wears away.

There is also cast-iron, which can be a great option and not very expensive. It conducts heat well. But you have to take care of it; you shouldn’t really submerge it in water, and you need to rub it with vegetable oil to keep it conditioned/seasoned. Very respected among cooks.

I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever heard the phrase “dutch oven” used in a serious manner. Anyway, I wound up purchasing this All-Clad Stainless 6-Piece Set and so far it’s great. Made some hash browns this weekend and got some crispy onion action that I never achieved with my previous pans.

Related: Lodge cast iron [SvN]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/376-cookware-advice

Sun’s Dan Ingalls has been talking about Project Flair, a new open source programing environment:

“It’s a self-supporting Web programming kernel that’s all written in JavaScript,” Ingalls said when interviewed during the Sun Labs Open House event in Menlo Park, Calif. Small and simple, Flair presents a “great vehicle for experimenting with [what] I guess what you would call, sort of, collaborative object development, that kind of thing,” said Ingalls.

“It’s sort of almost an opposite approach to AJAX,” leveraging a multi-user whiteboard concept for development, he said.

My favourite part:

“AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model”

Whatever you feel about HTML, DOM, CSS, and “all that stuff”, a couple of developers know it and work with it. Competing with the open web again? At least the project uses JavaScript and not SomeNewBetterLanguageForYouToLearnFromScratch.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/suns-project-flair-ajax-without-the-dom-css-html-er-wait

VegUI is another Ajax framework that also masks as a JavaScript based window manager.

Unlike all frameworks, this one has been worked on for a long time before coming out to the public:

vegUI was originally developed to serve as a foundation for the online browser-based mmorpg Lands of Kazram. So
it was developed with 4 core features in mind:

1. Speed
2. Compact Design
3. Total control over appearance, flexibility
4. Modular Design

I like to think that i’ve managed to stay true to all four of those concepts, and now 2.5 years after the development on vegUI had started i feel quite comfortable in releasing it to the public.

There is a lot of documentation including tutorials.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/vegui-ajax-framework-and-widgets

Yahoo announced today that it will acquire the 80% of advertising network RightMedia that it doesn’t already own for $680 million in cash and Yahoo stock.

Yahoo previously bought 20% of the company in a $45 million Series B round of funding announced in October 2006. The company has raised over $50 million to date.

This move counters Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick earlier this month for $3.1 billion, and signals that Yahoo wants more weapons in its arsenal to fight the ongoing online advertising war beyond their new Panama release.

RightMedia runs an advertising marketplace that allows for much more efficient advertsing pricing than older negotiated models (something still in the planning stages at DoubleClick). See our coverage of their RMX Direct product from August 2005.

RightMedia also tends to work with large intermediate ad brokers and addresses the short tail of the ad market (as does DoubleClick), whereas Overture and Adsense are definitely long tail products with many smaller advertisers and publishers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/113018087/

There has been a ton of work going on over in Dojo land, and Alex has given his hands a rest from coding, to give us an update on Dojo 0.9 over at SitePen HQ.

It is wrong to think of Dojo as an Ajax toolkit. It is more akin to a stdlib for JavaScript, as it is so many modules that are very broad indeed.

That being said, there has been a push to make Dojo even more pragmatic, lean, and fast. It is great to see the new course of action:

Early this year it became clear that for folks building Dojo apps, the question of “what is Dojo?” was becoming increasingly hard to answer. Each individual user might be working with a different subset and therefore they don’t share a common definition, which makes sharing what you know about the system harder than it needs to be.

In response, we’re in the middle of a huge undertaking: rethink the entire API surface area of Dojo from the ground up and split it up into 3 different top-level projects. With R&D dollars and time coming from all corners of the Dojo universe, 0.9 is shaping up to be smaller, faster, more coherent, and easier to understand.

What this means is:

• Dojo Base: This new core is aiming at 50k (< 20k gz), and will contain “things like dojo.query(), dojo.connect(), the package system, style and DOM manipulation functions, ajax, and a small-but-flexible animation system.” An important change is that there will be only one dojo.js per version, unlike now, where you can build your own dojo.js files, or choose a set packaged version.
• Dijit: The new widget system will be its own package. “The Dijit team is working on a set of consistent, themed, localized, and accessible widgets that not only improve on the usability of the existing widget set, but will also provide huge performance improvements in declaring and constructing widgets in a page.”

The Dojo team is already seeing fruits of their labors with performance improvements, even before they have done the final tweaks.

In the future, I hope for a world where a lot of these libraries will Just Be There, so you won’t have to have the same size worries, and instead we will be able to focus on speed, and other issues. When you look at most popular libraries, the reason they are popular is often to do with the libraries that you have access too (e.g. CPAN).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-09-a-new-leaner-meaner-dojo