Ajax Girl

David Recordon has just started his OSCON talk, embedded above, on supporting the Open Web.

He is announcing the Open Web Foundation, a new attempt to have a place for us to incubate, license, and build community around specifications, protocols, and more.

I posted about this on my blog as I am an initial member:

I am excited to see the recent talk of Open Web Foundation is now out there. I think that it is poised to become a great new corner of the Web giving us a place for the other stuff.

Let’s take an example. Imagine that you came up with a great idea, something like OAuth. That great idea gains some traction and more people want to get involved. What do you do? People ask about IP policy, and governance, and suddenly you see yourself on the path of creating a new MyApiFoundation.

Wait a minute! There are plenty of standards groups and other organizations out there, surely you don’t have to create MyApiFoundation?

Well, there is the W3C and OASIS, which are pay to play orgs. They have their place, but MyApi may not fit in there. The WHATWG has come up with fantastic work, but the punting on IP was an issue too (solved by working with the W3C).

MyApi has some code in there, so how about putting this in Apache? Apache is great for code, but it doesn’t deal with the other stuff, which is fine. That isn’t its mandate. Apache does things very well though, especially when it comes to governance and the incubator process. What if we had a foundation that had some of the same values around people participating (so anyone can, versus companies) and a varied community (not just a few blokes from the same company).

This is why I am hopeful for the Open Web Foundation. It is a new place to look at if you come up with something helpful for the Open Web, a place that may match your values.

But wait a minute, what about this “Open Web” thing again. As I just said on a post about defining the term, people can’t agree on what the darn thing is! There is a lot of gut feel “Flash and Silverlight are not the Open Web, but GWT is!”

I believe that the Open Web Foundation needs to be a leader in working this out. With metrics in place, the foundation can bless projects that meet the requirements. When a project starts it may not be Open Web yet (e.g. multiple browser implementations). We need a place to move forward and push the Web. Can’t wait to see what happens there.

Announcing a new foundation isn’t what matters. What really matters is what comes of it. I am excited to see how this all evolves.

In somewhat related news, Google Code now supports content licensing to go along with your open source project.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/344756224/open-web-foundation-david-recordon-at-oscon

Stoyan Stefanov has a post that discusses the issues with browsers blocking on script tags.

He discusses the general problem and how YUI has a helper for it by using onreadystatechange and onload:

The game is changing though, as he mentions:

Safari and IE8 are already changing the way scripts are getting loaded. Their idea is to download the scripts in parallel, but execute them in the sequence they’re found on the page. It’s likely that one day this blocking problem will become negligible, because only a few users will be using IE7 or lower and FF3 or lower. Until then, a dynamic script tag is an easy way around the problem.

Danny Thorpe wrote some comments and the issue with Safari:

This works great for Firefox and IE, but fails completely in the Safari browser. Safari doesn’t implement onLoad notifications for script tags. This forces you to abandon the onLoad technique and instead use the technique of embedding something at the end of each script file to signal when the file has been loaded.

The script libraries for the Windows Live sites use this technique - every source file contains a function call at the bottom that tells a central notifier that it has been loaded. Other code can ask the notifier to signal them when a file or set of files have been loaded. This works in all browsers without relying on diverging browser idiosyncrasies.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/344540237/getting-around-the-blocking-of-script

Kellan from Flickr, and Evan from ENTP gave a talk at OSCON on building data services with XMPP which gave plenty of examples including notes on OAuth.

We have written about Jabber in JavaScript, and as XMPP continues to grow and grow on the Web, it is good to keep up with it.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/344506755/beyond-rest-xmpp-pubsub

Darrell Meyer has posted a preview of the Ext GWT Grid and more.

Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing.

Grid vs. Table

One if the biggest differences between Table and Grid is performance. Table does not scale well with a large number of rows. Grid renders its data much faster and can handle larger data sets with noticeable differences in initial rendering times.

Table is a container of TableItems which work without a model. TableItems deal directly will cell values. Model support is added using a TableBinder which works with a Store. With Grid, there are no child components and Grid works with the Store directly. This design simplifies use and the binder is no longer needed.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/344483992/extgwtgrid-plugins-editable