dev: create on-the-fly graphics on websites

Mahemoff’s Software-As-She’s-Developed-blog gives a brief overview on eight methods for creating dynamic graphics within the browser. besides more obvious choices like SVG/VML (Vector Markup Language, Microsoft’s equivalet of SVG) or Flash, the post also introduces lesser known options like the Canvas-element (think of a fully scriptable -element – currently supported by Firefox, Safari & Opera) [...]

ajax survey 2006

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 [...]

dev: jQuery 1.0 released

John Resig has released jQuery 1.0, a light-weight (about 10kbyte), cross-browser javascript-library including all the usual AJAX-functionality, basic gfx and advanced event-handling. however, jQuery really is focused on DOM-traversing and -modification, allowing easy manipulation of stylesheets as well as selection & manipulation of DOM-nodes (supporting CSS and basic XPath as selector-languages). iterator-methods (think ‘foreach’) for [...]

how web2.0 are you?

Scott Schiller built this prove-of-concept, using javascript to sniff on visitors browser-histories. using the CSS pseudo-class visited:, any script can determine if a user has visited a particular URL before. this issue of course is many years old, but Schiller uses it in a fun way: by checking your browser-history for various web2.0′ish websites, his [...]

dev: free AJAX online-course

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 [...]

dev: JavaScript debugger for Safari

as reported on Ajaxian, Webkit – the browser-engine powering Safari, Mail and other OS X applications – has finally received an integrated JavaScript-debugger called Drosera. since Safari’s implementation of JavaScript is differing from Firefox and others in some spots, this will ease life of many developers greatly.

If you’re a Mac user and haven’t been intrigued [...]

dev: compressing javascript & css

thinkvitamin.com features a very detailed article by Cal Henderson (flickr.com) on how-to serve large javascript- and css-libraries in performance-critical environments. Cal describes best practices for splitting, compressing and caching of these code-monsters. A must-read for all developers, the article also gives in-depth knowledge about how various browsers handle this type of content.

dev: customized typography with sIFR

during the last few days I’ve been diligently working on a web-application in the area of print/typography, featuring a browser-based text-editor with support for various fontfaces. the main problem in realizing such an editor is the impossibility to load arbitrary fontfaces (besides the standards, like helvetica, courier…) into the browser.
sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), a [...]