Aaron Hopkins (Google) published a great, in-depth article on optimizing page load times, especially considering AJAX-apps with their inflationary number of http-requests. Hopkins gets dirty analyzing http-implementations of current popular browsers, eventually deriving a set of useful optimiziations no web-developer should miss. recommended!
ThinkFree previewed an AJAX Edition of their online Office suite on DEMOfall last weekend, promising increased performance compared to the Java-only version (reviewed here), roundtrip compatibility with Microsoft Office (meaning that it’s possible to exchange documents back and forth without losing layout or data) and improved collaboration features. compared to most competitors, ThinkFree currently offers by far the best functionality, so it’ll be interesting to see how well they can migrate features from Java to Javascript. here’s a (low-res) video of ThinkFree’s talk at DEMOfall, the presentation-module looks quite cool.
while ThinkFree didn’t announce a release-date for the AJAX Edition yet, the company rolled out another nice feature with their product recently: ThinkFree Office can now access images from Flickr directly, even allowing users to query pictures free for non-commercial usage.
Ajaxian released the results of their 2006 ajax-survey, asking more than 860 developers about their coding-habits. according to the survey, the leading ajax-framework clearly is Prototype, with about 43% of the developers using it to date, followed closely by the visual-effects library Script.aculo.us (33%) which is built on top of Prototype. Dojo, DWR and Moo.fx close in between 11 and 19%. personally I’m using Script.aculo.us for the eyecandy and some convenience-features, but prefer to do ajax-calls directly via xmlhttprequest - interestingly, so do 25% of the polls’ respondents.
ajax backend-coding is predominated by PHP (49%) and Java (37%), with some smaller chunks for .NET (16%) and Ruby-on-Rail (14%). check out the detailed results…
as of last saturday, Google-fanboys all around the globe may help improving Googles image search results without getting paid 
seriously, Google released a new tool coined Google Image Labeler into public beta (sic!), inviting volunteers to add semantic tags to images indexed by Google Image Search. to make things more interesting, tagging is done simultaneously by pairs of randomly matched users on the web. here’s the lowdown:
Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out.
besides making the act of tagging fun and even a bit exciting (try it out if you don’t believe me!), the gameplay-approach essentially ensures the validity of tags by double-checks (and who knows better than Google, that the internet isn’t a place to trust people?). currently there is no disclosure on how and when the tagging information will be incorporated into Image Search.
check out this post at ajaxian for more details on the technical side of Image Labeler.
Sang Shin, technology architect & evangelist at Sun Microsystems, is going to offer a free 10 week online-course on mastering AJAX, starting august 4th. the course is spread over 11 classes, containing about 40 hours of learning-material (PDF-slides, flash-demos & -screencasts). the extensive schedule covers AJAX-basics, the Dojo-Toolkit, Java-related topics (DWR, JSF-integration, jMaki) and the Google Web Toolkit. looking at the excellent material from a previous online-course Sang has done on J2EE-programming, this is highly recommended for any AJAX-beginner or -intermediate!
