Note: Kroo from IRC warns that this technique will only work if the app is launched from launcher or the springboard.
Also: Drunknbass found that you may have to restart springboard before it will work.
And: Check out Erling’s code if you want a faster sample rate.

• calling console.profile in your javascript to turn on the profiler for specific regions of code, rather than the bazooka style profiling that the profile button gives you.
• There is a “log all calls to” option in the right click menu when you are inside a function definition in the script tab. Params are logged! If you want to log the stack traces, use console.trace.
• I use the box model display often, but I didn’t notice before that rulers are added to your page when you mouse-over the box. Nice.
• When you are editing an attribute in the HTML or the CSS edit modes, you can use cursor keys to increase or decrease dimensions.
• Documentation for the firebug API is coming soon!
• Ctrl-Click while debugging will “run to the clicked line”.
• When you are in the DOM tab, the variables you added to the name space are in bold at the top… handy.
• When you paste multi-line text into the console’s command line, you get a larger text area to enter your code.
• The copy button in that larger javascript area mushes together the current javascript into a string suitable for bookmarklets.

Questions:
When will Javascript be directly editable in Firebug?
When will Javascript have syntax highlighting?

• New font (smaller and more readable)
• The breadcrumb of the selected dom item (during inspection) is now interactive. You can highlight and select any ancestor of the currently selected item.
• The inspected item now has a graphical depiction of its box model (’layout’ in the right pane).
• All CSS lines in the CSS tab and the Style tab of the inspected item can now be toggled on and off just by clicking them.
• Editing the CSS and HTML now seems smoother somehow - before the feedback didn’t seem as immediate.
• The net tab gives a graphical representation of requests to the server. And it’s not just XMLHTTPRequests anymore - it’s everything.
• You can turn firebug on for one site only, now, rather than for everything. Nice.

• This discussion list archive is extremely helpful.
• The tests are often more useful than the documentation.
• Dojo.Select is a very cool alternative to the HTML version, but I can’t find a way to set it’s value programmatically if the options are coming from a dataURL AND the option text is different than the option values.
• Whenever you have a problem recreating something you saw in an example, run that example against the version of dojo you are using. It MAY be that the latest dojo code is not compatible with the code you saw in the example.
• The dojo blog is fairly active.
• I’m having a lot of trouble with FormBind (the dojo AJAX mechanism used to post forms to the server), but I’m sure I’ll work it out. It probably has something to do with the fact that I have many forms on the page, not just one. UPDATE: Solved my issue and logged a bug about it (FormBind gives no feedback if the form’s action url is a 404.).

Update: I uploaded the app I wrote this weekend to download animations from a url to run on the lights.  Details here.

Here’s a screenshot of an early version of vis, comparing 4 runs of SiteBuilder:

By the way, this image is hosted at Thomas Hawk’s company, Zooomr.

Travis also mentioned SCons to me - a build tool that is apparently much more powerful (and expressive) than make, yet less verbose and more readable than ant. Looks very interesting. The SCons team is preparing a 1.0 and one of their members has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program.

Here are some of my thoughts on “The Ajax Experience”. It was a great conference with a very technical audience and SERIOUSLY knowledgeable speakers.

General

· The speakers all had great attitudes. I was impressed by both their technical and speaking ability. Additionally, most of them were influential members of the Ajax/DHTML community.

· At registration, we were given a CD with the slides for almost all of the presentations. This was very helpful in deciding which sessions to attend. There were 5 parallel tracks with 7 sessions each, so choosing was tough. The slides made it possible to avoid any session that would just be review for me.

· The WIFI was OK. Several times, I had trouble connecting, but it worked most of the time.

· Power outlets were limited to the sides and rear of the rooms. Some rooms only had 4 outlets. That was a bummer.

Sessions

· Opening Keynote - Dion and Ben, the Ajaxians - Very good. The humor and polish they bring to their podcasts was here, too. A fun introduction to the conference.

· Expert Panel Discussion 1,2,3 -

· Immediately following the Keynotes, 6 or 7 experts took the stage and answered questions. They did this with a different group of people each day.

· The topics ranged from the future of browsers to where is Ajax headed to what developers can do to convince IE to catch up to FF.

· Without exception, these discussions were excellent. The questions asked demonstrated the range of technical ability of the attendees and most of the questions were intelligent.

· Important messages, broadcast by the panels:

· Accessibility is hard, but Ajax doesn’t make it harder.

· Ajax now means DHTML applications with an asynchronous feature or two. Ajax is no longer spoken of as just XMLHttpRequest and Iframe tricks. “Get over it”.

· Don’t build DHTML/Ajax apps without using a cross-browser toolkit. There is a good selection now, you can get precisely what you want. Big toolkits, small toolkits, toolkits highly integrated with your server language (DWR for Java, etc), toolkits that are independent of your server language (dojo, mochikit, etc)…

· Message to toolkits: The toolkits that are well integrated with specific server languages should find a way to bind to other languages as well. RoR and PHP users should be able to use DWR for instance.

· Message to browsers: Adopt a standard for storing large amounts of data on the client. Adopt a standard for cross browser XML and JSON to facilitate mashups.

· Never trust the client.

· Track 2, Session 1: Intro to Dojo with Alex Russell, Track 2, Session 2: Dojo in Depth with Alex Russell

· Based on panel discussions and conversations with attendees, Dojo seems to be the most mature / most powerful toolkit available.

· The latest version, .3, has a lot of cool features including lfx. lfx is a system for chaining animations to create very smooth, custom animations.

· Dojo is huge, but the build system creates small js files by only including the functionality that your code uses and also by obfuscating/shrinking the result.

· The build system also manages dependencies correctly.

· Yahoo is using Dojo heavily and has been giving a lot back.

· You can use cross site scripting to overcome the 2-download-thread-per-server limitation. Dojo will be using this technique soon to reduce the download time associated with their toolkit.

· Tons of widgets.

· Custom widgets are built by writing an html template, some css and overriding javascript hooks, if necessary. Looks pretty simple.

· Custom widgets can inherit functionality from other widgets - I don’t know how easy/hard/maintainable this is.

· Dojo’s drag and drop system knows how to set up drop targets to filter what draggable object types they allow. Dojo claims to have the best drag and drop system of all the toolkits.

· KeyNote: Ajax and Flex - Adobe

· Basically, later versions of Flash allow ActionScript better access to graphical functionality.

· Also, the JavaScript-to-ActionScript bridge is working better in later versions of Flash.

· Some cool samples of using JavaScript on the page to create animated graphical effects in an embedded Flash component.

· Google Finance is an example of these techniques.

· Track 2, Session 3: Writing Advanced Ajax Applications with DWR with Joe Walker

· DWR has a Comet / Reverse Ajax implementation. The server can trigger events on the client. 2 ways: the client can keep a connection open to the server OR the client can poll the server for commands to execute.

· DWR is tightly integrated with Java on the server. It cannot be used without Java on the server.

· Java to JavaScript conversion of complicated objects is fairly automatic. To a point.

· Some applications will not need any hand-written Javascript. Widgets can be set up by writing Java code and the corresponding JavaScript glue is plugged in by DWR.

· DWR provides a java API for adding scriptaculous effects to the resultant HTML pages.

· Track 2, Session 4: JSON with Douglas Crockford

· JSON is a subset of the JavaScript language intended to express complex data for transport between two computers.

· JSON parsers are available for TONS of languages.

· JSON is lighter weight than XML. The parser is less code and the data has less overhead.

· JSON is also requires an agreement between the parties involved related to the format of data types. Data types are not standardized in JSON. Data types are standardized in SOAP.

· Both JSON and XML/SOAP have pros and cons.

· JSONP is a cross-site scripting technique.

· All of Yahoo’s APIs are exposed using JSONP. Basically, your DHTML code adds a script tag to the dom with a URL at Yahoo that includes a query string parameter telling Yahoo the Javascript variable name it should use for the data. The result is then accessible to your Javascript without requiring a signing dialog, etc.

· The JSON proponents are trying to get browsers to agree to allow for cross-site JSON in a more standardized way.

· [I've heard that Zimbra chooses JSON over XML for their email app because of the lower overhead.]

· Keynote: Lessons and Tips from the Ajax Frontline with Scott Dietzen (founder, CTO, Zimbra)

· Zimbra’s toolkit is being adopted by the Apache foundation as their official DHTML/Ajax toolkit.

· Mashups are the future.

· Zimbra’s DHTML libraries are based on SWT conventions, so Java people should be comfortable.

· Track 2, Session 5: Google APIs

· Lots of Mashup examples. This presentation was not technical enough.

· Track 5, Session 6: Beyond Cookies: Persistent Storage for Ajax/DHTML Apps using Dojo.Storage with Brad Neuberg

· A set of functions related to storing information offline.

· There will be many storage implementations. The first is Flash. Others will include cookies, form saving, ActiveX, Firefox’s offline storage API (coming soon).

· Flash lets you store 100KB of data on the client without asking the user.

· The user is asked when you go past 100K, then again when you go past 1MB, etc.

· Flash 6 is the minimum for the Flash storage implementation. Flash 8 is required for Safari.

· Cross platform, cross browser was really hard, but it works now. Flash has a lot of gotchas in various browsers - especially Flash 6.

· Flash 6 install base is 97.1.

· Takes advantage of Dojo’s existing io library for serialization of objects.

· Some browser/Flash version combinations: storage is slow.

· DO NOT DO THIS ON YOUR OWN. USE DOJO.STORAGE. TONS OF CORNER CASES THAT ARE FIXED ALREADY IN THE LIBRARY.

· Keynote: Brendan Eich, the creator of Javascript

· Very, very dense presentation involving the future of the LANGUAGE, not it’s integration with DOM, etc.

· A lot of what was discussed is still being decided.

· The most important issue with the future of Javascript is memory management and he discussed some things that will help.

· Track 3, Session 7: GreaseMonkey and Ajax with Jason Hunter

· All review, for me.

· GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you run Javascript on pages after they have been loaded by the browser, but before the onload event fires.

· 1 million GreaseMonkey user scripts are now available. (REALLY?)

Thoughts on the conference from other attendees can be found here.

Eric Albert notes that Rotor used to support Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, but is only supporting Windows in its latest incarnation.  Rotor is Microsoft’s shared source .Net implementation.

Now, I don’t think Microsoft has any real obligation (or business reason) to port .Net to other platforms, but I wish they would, with no strings attached.  With a lot of help from Sun, they managed to really hurt Java’s chances for becoming a contendor for Windows GUI apps and, to make up for that, I’d really appreciate it if they made it super easy for .Net GUI apps to be cross platform.

I learned a lot about the language and the programming environment from the video.  Here is some of that information.  Sorry if I got anything wrong.  I didn’t take notes.
KPL Version 1 (currently available)

• Based on .Net.
• The IDE is based on Visual Studio.  Lots of Visual Studio functionaliy is available, simplified, including code block collapsing and auto-complete.
• Sprites, motion and input are easy.
• Syntax similar to basic.
• Lots of docs and examples.
• Thriving community of example submitters.
• Needs more girl-oriented content.

KPL Version 2 (coming soon, although most of it was shown in the video)

• Debugging in the IDE (breakpoints, watchpoints, list of all variables in scope and their values).
• Objects and user defined objects.
• Distributable EXEs.
• The KPL libraries will be available to C#, etc and you’ll be able to automatically convert your KPL code to other .Net languages with one click.
• DirectX wrappers - build 3D apps (a 40 line program was demoed with a spaceship flying around in a textured box.  Watch the video - words don’t do it justice.)  Terrain/character collision is taken care of for you.
• Build your own modules in any .NET language with an SDK, expose that functionality to KPL.
• Control an aimable camera over USB.

Amazon recently introduced a feature called Product Previews for people who are using their Associates program. It’s pretty cool. Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliates system where sites link to Amazon products and banners with a special id in the url which gives the Associate a share of the profits from the sale of the linked products. With Product Previews, links to Amazon can now have rich popups when the links are moused over. The popups contain a product image, a buy now button, review information, etc. Note: you can move the preview window around. Doing that will ‘pin’ it to the page until you hit close.

Basically, the normal link format for Associates hasn’t changed: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/
INSERT_ASIN_HERE/INSERT_ASSOC_ID_HERE. The difference is that you add Javascript to the bottom of the page. So, all your old links to amazon products will automatically be given the Preview treatment.

For instance: Naked Conversations (book), Tron (dvd), Palm TX (pda).

During this beta period, only 50% of visitors to your pages will actually see the Previews - this is so Amazon can see if it’s helping or hurting business.

The code snippet to add the Amazon Product Preview to your site is here: snippet.txt. The official docs are here.

As with SiteBuilder and the rest of our product line, we’ve been updating SiteBuilder Lite every month or two to keep it fresh and to give more value to our customers.  I’ll be interested to see what Google comes up with and whether or not they’ll be able to catch up to us.

We actually do have an API in Windows Vista that allows you to take the contents of one window and present them in another Window. This is what is used in the live previews that show up in the tooltips over taskbar buttons, and can be used by developers in their own creative ways.

So, Kam, thanks for the news! Now, can you post some sample C# that uses the previews to get us started?

I did a few quick searches to see who else is doing this kind of thing (large companies rewarding open source dev) - it’s happened before, but not often enough. Sansblog talks about why that is (probably). It’s hard to reward a group of people without upsetting the people who were passed over.

tibike77 on slashdot reminds us that we can all reward the open source community through paypal donation links. We can also contribute to bounties to pay for work that hasn’t been completed, yet, as an incentive.  There is no good index of community funded bounties, but there is an index of company funded bounties here.

In Ep 14, as usual, the guys did a great job of presenting the information in a concise, always-on-topic manner. I think it’s pretty clear that they have a detailed outline set up beforehand and they stick to it without sounding canned. They went over a ton of Ajax info but the standouts, for me, were DPolls(Ajax poll system with lots of features and effects), Dojo’s File Upload Widget, a warning that IE6 hacks might break in IE7, type-checking in JS and the impact on IDEs, and an IE library that allows for cross-browser “Canvas” functionality using VML (I LOVE CANVAS). They also discussed the frameworks and tools that they are partial to for their own web development work.

Also in Ep 14, they discussed the Ajax Experience conference they set up for May 10-12 in SF. Wow! They have a great lineup, a decent price ($1000), and they are keeping attendance small (500).

Ep 13, an interview with Patrick Lightbody of WebWork, was also great. Lots of info about WebWorks (including a mention of the Dojo/Webworks publish and subscribe technique), and the conversation at the end about Selenium was neat.  From the Selenium website:

Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.

• Browser compatability testing. Test your application to see if it works correctly on different browsers and operating systems. The same script can run on any Selenium platform.
• System functional testing. Create regression tests to verify application functionality and user acceptance.

Selenium uses a unique mechanism which allows it to run on so multiple platforms. Installed with your application webserver, Selenium automatically deploys its JavaScript automation engine — the Browser Bot — to your browser when you point it at the Selenium install point on your webserver. Thus, you must have write access to the machine your web application server is running on to install Selenium.

“Considering the simplicity of it, it is almost surprising that no one has thought of doing this previously. The framework is simple and the code is neat and very maintainable. Sometimes it takes a work of genius to find the uncomplicated solution to a potentially complicated problem.” - Antony Marcano

Selenium was developed by team of programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks (see below). It is open-source software and can be downloaded and used without charge. It is currently under active development by our team. Stay tuned for updates and further announcements.

ThoughtWorks is a leader in Agile development methods for enterprise software development. Selenium is designed specifically for the acceptance testing requirements of Agile teams. However, teams using more traditional development will also find it useful.

]]> http://blog.tokash.org/2006/02/10/ajaxian-podcasts-the-ajax-experience-conference/feed/ http://blog.tokash.org/2006/01/26/personal-portals-desktop-gadgets/ http://blog.tokash.org/2006/01/26/personal-portals-desktop-gadgets/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:24:47 +0000 John Tokash http://blog.tokash.org/2006/01/26/personal-portals-desktop-gadgets/

Microsoft will allow gadgets to be dragged and dropped back and forth between live.com and the desktop (operating system). And they aren’t waiting for Vista - an update to Windows XP will be coming soon that will allow this drag and drop functionality. — Michael Arrington

That is crushing news for a lot of fledgeling personal portal companies.  Still, it sounds WONDERFUL to me as a user.
Iamalpha.com from AOL also looks interesting - it’s going for the “lots of mini dhtml gadgets that interact with other services” thing, too.  If you can’t figure out how to launch it, go here and click “go play”.

And, hey, am I the only one around here that remembers DoDots?  They did what Konfabulator does before Konfabulator did it.   Say that 10 times fast!

OH!  And WHAT IS UP with web.archive.org?  I’m not allowed to see past incarnations of the DoDots.com site because the current domain owner forbids it?  Good lord.

Robots.txt Query Exclusion.

We’re sorry, access to http://www.dodots.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.

NOTE: After I started down this path, I found  Julien Lamarre’s excellent work on the topic.  For some reason, Julien’s tests don’t work in Blazer on the Palm TX, while I have no idea if my tests work on anything other than Firefox and Blazer.

Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it’s supposed to be. It provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granuity levels of contols. With Codase, one can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Codase can do free form text searches AND makes it easy to search just method names or class names. The results are also pretty-printed(formatting and colors).

141 hits on a search for methods named doit. Who knew?