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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) or CSS-based graphics libraries. don’t get too excited though, as most methods are not supported by all browser-platforms yet.

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…

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 processing batches of DOM-nodes are available too. developers looking for a javascript-library strong on data-manipulation, should give jQuery a try - especially since it’s fairly well documented.

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 script computes your personal web2.0-awareness (mine was only 56% )

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!

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 by Firefox or more lately by Flock, I also recommend checking out the Safari Enhancer for a better user-experience with Apples own browser.

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.

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 free package of javascript, css and flash-code developed by mike davidson from newsvine.com, offers a unique solution for browser-based font-rendering. after loading a normal (x)html-webpage, a javascript-routine selects any number of marked DOM-elements (f.e. all headline-elements). the text-content of these elements is then replaced by flash-movies of the exact same dimension, rendering the text in any arbitrary font, embedded inside the movie. the whole process is instantly finished and runs hidden from the user. another big advantage: if flash is not installed or javascript is disabled, the browser displays all information in a chosen default-fontface. since all text is included in the (x)html-document, there are also no restrictions regarding search-engine spiders.

see sIFR in action: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/