State of Ajax for June 2008: Apple flexes Open Web muscles
Written by on July 1st, 2008 in Ajax News.
June was a great month for the Open Web. First, Apple delivered a one-two punch with showing Mobile Me, powered by the native Web and SproutCore, and showing SquirrelFish as JavaScript starts to get a loooot faster on browsers. Firefox had a party as millions of people downloaded Firefox 3 final release, and immediately talked about 3.1 coming soon. The flywheel is moving. Opera 9.5 is also there, and IE 8 beta 2 is coming in August.
Velocity, the performance conference, also showed the interest in making the Web faster, as many tools were announced to help out us devs. We also saw a lot of cool uses of Canvas/SVG, as developers delve low level and see that they actually work very well.
So, we sit at the crux of two paths. On the one hand, browsers are getting faster and faster and adding great new technology for us (including small things like CSS variables. finally!). On the other hand, we are creating more compelling user experiences (e.g. 280 Slides, Mobile Me). These forces work with each other. As we do cooler apps that push the boundaries, the browsers have to come back with better performance and tools to match. Expectations are changing, and we need to match them.
Here is the full roundup:
Browsers
- Flipping out over Safari
- IE 8 beta 2 coming in August
- X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7
- Mozilla Week: From Client (Firefox 3) to Server (Weave) to Mobile (Fennec)
- Opera gets proactive and helps you fix your code
- Browser Memory Footprints; Watching with real usage
- Browser News: IE, FF, Safari, and Opera
Standards
- New in standards: Acid4 and HTML 5 update
- W3C Progress Events 1.0 Working Draft
- OpenAjax Alliance white papers on Mobile Ajax and recent browser advances
Performance
- SquirrelFish: Details on the new
- SquirrelFish: Technical excitement
- String Performance in IE: Array.join vs += continued
- Is “finally” the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues?
- Jiffy Firebug Plugin: Fine grained calculation of performance timings
- YSlow now has Firefox 3 support
- Rendering performance in Canvas compared to SVG and VML
- Clientperf: Simple Client-Side Rails Performance
- KITE: Keynote’s Internet Test Environment
- A Technique For Lazy Script Loading
- Velocity Conference Videos and Slides
JavaScript
- An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino
- Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript
- Javascript HTML Construction Benchmark
- The fight for cross domain XMLHttpRequest
- eval(’foo=a’, obj.fn); How you aren’t private in Firefox
- Google Analytics after onLoad and document.write for XHTML
- Johnson: Wrapping JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace, and ARAX
- Gaia Widgets 3.0 “Glory”
- Audible Ajax Episode 27: SproutCore with Charles Jolley
- SproutCore: Being talked of as a Flash killer? Really?
- Apple, SproutCore, and Coherent
- modules.js: A New Stand-alone JavaScript Module Loader
- Mascara: Putting lipstick on JavaScript?
- Validanguage 0.9: More form validation
- SymbolicWeb: Ajax and Comet with Lisp
- dragtable: drag-and-drop reorderable columns for an HTML table
- Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites
- ensure: on demand resources
- Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript
ExtJS
- Leveraging Ext JS on the Server via Jaxer
- WiiExtJS: Building Ajax apps that run on the Wii Opera browser
Dojo
- Badging Flickr with Dojo
- Dojo Firebug Lite: Beyond console.log
- Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime
- A Double Dose of Dojo
- Dojo gets AIM API Support from AOL
- Working with Web Services with ease; dojo.data and the WikipediaStore
YUI
MooTools
jQuery
- jQuery UI 1.5: Effects, API, and Themes
- jQuery Release 1.2.6: Performance Improvements and Dimensions Plugin Added to Core
- Implementing infinite scrolling with jQuery
- jQuery Selectors Refcard Now Available
- Preloading Images with jQuery
- jsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree component
Gears, AIR, and more
- Gears 0.3 Released, and Google I/O videos on Ajax related content available
- Frizone: JavaScript dev, test, and deployment environment
- Frank Sinatra, Flash, and Ajax: Deckmyplace.com
- flXHR: Flash based XHR from flensed
- SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news
- Fluid.app gets another new build
Design: CSS, SVG, Canvas
- Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0
- Using CSS transforms to Build a Coverflow Effect
- Mozilla Experiments with Applying SVG Effects to HTML
- Coda Slider Effect
- Algorithm Ink: Algorithm-driven Painting with Sharing and On-line Editing
- Photo Collages with Canvas
- CSS General Sibling Combinator in action
- CSS Variables are …. here!
- ShiftZoom: Zoomify your oversize images
- MooWheel and MooCirclePack for visualizations
- Hypno trip down the fractal rug
- Our Signal: Page Cloud Visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker news
- Processing and Obsessing
Showcases
- Addressbook History goes into the cloud with App Engine
- Endpoint Resolver: JavaScript Library to hunt for Location redirects
- Acrobat.com: PDF and Flash sitting in a tree
- crossdomain.xml, Java, and JNLP
- Canvas Quest: Rogue like RPG game
- Yet Another Web 2.0 Button Generator
- PodiPodi: Enso / Quicksilver for the Web
- 72photos: Proto/Scripty Photo Sharing Site
Utilties
- NitobiBug: Cross browser debugging
- JavaScript Protocol Fuzzer
- JSON Diff Released
- TileStack: HyperCard for the Web
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/324378230/state-of-ajax-for-june-2008-apple-flexes-open-web-muscles