News

The Ext JS team has released version 1.0 of its SDK for developing GWT applications with the Ext JS library. Despite some controversy around Ext's licensing strategy (namely the switch from LGPL to GPL), Ext GWT is currently one of the better integrations between a Java web application framework and a JavaScript framework.

Ext GWT 1.0 has been compiled and tested against GWT 1.5 RC1. Downloads are located here.

Today is the official launch date for Mozilla's Firefox 3! The new version of the browser promises quite a few new features include performance improvements.

Below is an excerpt of a few new features.

Improved Platform for Developers

• New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering
  architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well
  as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
• Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in
  about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images
  with embedded color profiles.
• Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline
  functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their
  site for this feature to be available to users).
• A more complete overview of href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers">Firefox 3
  for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided
  optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
  Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office
  run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular
  SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
• Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount
  of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session.
  Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new
  memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and
  caching strategies have been tuned.
• Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences
  are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent
  data loss even if their system crashes.

You can read all about the new features here.

I am just waiting until I can download the software (should be any moment) and I'd love to hear if you plan on downloading Firefox 3 or if you prefer a different browser.

Digg Spy is the real time tracker that shows what is happening on the social network Digg as it happens. The tool is a great way to follow Digg in a different way than the normal view.

We at Ajaxonomy.com have written a tool called the Digg Bury Recorder that uses a feed from Digg Spy to capture all of the buries of stories that are recorded by Digg Spy. Recently it was brought to my attention that the Digg Bury Recorder does not seem to be recorder new buries. In looking into the issue I found that the feed is not returning any data.

Thinking that perhaps Digg changed the feed (they have done this before) I went over to Digg Spy to check if the feed that is being used and the feed that we are using is correct. However, after leaving Digg Spy up for a moment I quickly realized that the Ajax portion of Digg Spy does not appear to be working (go to the page and it will look like it is working, but once it gets past the pre-loaded information it no longer works).

Without the Ajax portion of Digg Spy the application is useless and I wonder if I wonder if Digg knows of the problem or if they purposely broke the application (perhaps in an attempt to stop applications like the Digg Bury Recorder, although this doesn't really make sense).

Congratulations to the jQuery UI team on their release of jQuery UI 1.5!

jQuery UI provides low to high-level interactions and themeable widgets for your rich internet applications. Since it's built on the jQuery JavaScript Library, you have a solid foundation on which to build your apps. The library revolves around different mouse interactions, including drag/drop, sorting, selecting, and resizing. Also, you can expect to find the jQuery Enchant effects framework along with some reusable widgets [accordions, date picks, dialogs, sliders, and tabs] included in this release.

What's new?

- Refactored API
95% less exposed methods means 95% less methods you have to remember.

- Increased Stability
A dedicated bug tracker, new unit tests, and the addition of jquery.simulate.js - a plugin specifically designed to fire true browser events..

- Effects
As mentioned above, this release includes Enchant as a part of jQuery UI and includes features like advanced easing, class transitions (morphing) and color animations. You also get all the effects that come standard with script.aculo.us (blind,bounce,drop,fold,slide …), but also some new effects like transfer, explode. clip, and scale. Check out the demos.

View the changelog for a full list of features, bug fixes, and other changes in this release

Imagine you've downloaded a new UI library and are ready to integrate it into one of your applications, what's one of your big obstacles? That's right, figuring out how to get it to match your application's color scheme and look and feel. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a tool that could easily do most of the work for you?

Well get ready for ThemeRoller: a new theme creator for the jQuery UI library created by the crew at the Filament Group in Boston.

ThemeRoller gives you the ability to style your jQuery UI components in minutes. You can easily preview your theme as you make adjustments and when you're done, you can download a ZIP package containing the css, image, and demo page files for your theme. If you don't feel like rolling your own, or maybe want some inspiration, check out ThemeRoller's gallery to browse and download a variety of predefined themes.

Special thanks has to be given to the Liferay staff, who invested countless hours into the development of the new UI website, and with whom the team worked closely together to stabilize jQuery UI for all kinds of enterprise situations.

jQuery UI v1.5 Final Release: http://ui.jquery.com/download

Check out Themeroller

TIBCO has announced a milestone release for their General Interface Ajax Framework. Version 3.6 Milestone 1 is a preview intended for anyone considering migrations of their existing GI applications.

Via the release notes, here are the new features included in this release:

General Interface Template Language
The General Interface template language simplifies the creation of custom GUI components by using a technique that is already familiar to web developers—it builds on your knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. Using the General Interface template language, you can convert a single snippet of HTML—a widget—into a re-usable component. This means that if you’ve developed user interface components that combine HTML and JavaScript code, you can convert the functional user interface HTML elements into a General Interface template for custom usage.

CDF Form Mapping
A new CDF form mapping class is included in this release, jsx3.gui.CDF. This new class enables developers to map a CDF document in the local cache to on-screen form fields. By combining the features of jsx3.gui.Block and jsx3.xml.Cacheable, this new class enables developers to read and write cache data without the need to author additional JavaScript code. In other words, this new class is a visual container that knows how to bind the form fields it contains to values in a CDF document:

JSON mapping
General Interface has also added the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data interchange format to the XML Mapping Utility file types. The Mapping Utility uses these file types as the starting point to generate the mapping rules file. You specify the URL for the file you need for your use case, which contains a JSON string. The Mapping Utility evaluates the string and returns a JavaScript object.

To download GI 3.6 milestone 1, or the current stable release 3.5.1, visit gi.tibco.com

Also check out some additional GI resources and view the new GI Video Tutorials

Recently announced at the Ruby on Rails Weblog, Rails 2.1 has been released.

The new major features are:

• Time zones (by Geoff Buesing): Tutorial | Introdction | Railscast
• Dirty tracking: Introduction (partial updates) | Railscast
• Gem Dependencies: Introduction | Railscast
• Named scope (by Nick Kallen): Introduction | Railscast
• UTC-based migrations: Introduction | Railscast
• Better caching: Introduction

Read More

If you are working on a project you probably want to have a quick mock-up so the business can easily understand how a web application will look. Well, Yahoo! has just made it easier to do so with their new Design Stencil Kit.

Stencils kits are available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG) and cover the following topics:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• Grids
• Menus and Buttons
• Mobile - General
• Mobile - iPhone
• Navigation and Pagination
• OS Elements
• Placeholder Text
• Screen Resolutions
• Tabs
• Windows and Containers

To use a design stencil, download the stencil kit compatible with your design application, launch your design application, and start adding stencil objects to your projects. Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and Visio users can ungroup stencil objects to customize and manipulate size, layout, and aesthetics.

You can read more about the stencil kit here.

You can go directly to the stencil kits here.

So, get the Design Stencil Kit and show the business what you are working on. Or even better, get your favorite Business Analyst to do it for you.

Google recently released Google Health. The application makes it easy for users to keep track of their medical records. Along with releasing Google Health they have also released the Google Health Data API.

Below is an excerpt about the Google Health Data API.

The Google Health Data API allows client applications to view and send Health content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can use the Health Data API to create new medical records, request a list of medical records and query for medical records that match particular criteria.

Here are some of the things you can do with the Health Data API:

• Upload patient medical records.
• Get patient medical data and provide personalized functionality based on that data.

How do I start?

If you're new to the Google Health Data API, here's how we recommend you get started:

1. Get familiar with the Google Data protocol.
2. Read the Google Health Developer's Guide.
3. Refer to the Reference Guide, as needed.
4. Read about the supported CCR elements.

You can learn more about Google's Health Data API here.

I can see a lot of uses of this API for medical related mash-ups.

What if you are making a new web application that needs to search through files instead of just web pages. Well, you could write your own solution or you could use an existing search engine like Lucene.

Below is an excerpt from the Step Three: Profit! post about using Lucene.

There are a number of considerations to make when adding search to your site. For instance, you can usually get by pretty well with just integrating Google search into your website. This is fast, easy, and doesn't require messing with your backend code at all.

However, this is not really what I want. I want to let users search for files, not web pages, and I want the results integrated nicely with everything else. For instance, it would be cool to use a search query as a radio playlist like you can do on Hype Machine. So I'll need to build my own search engine.

This is not really that hard to do. I would recommend you read some articles and then download Managing Gigabytes for Java. Those articles are by Tom from AudioGalaxy. You may remember AudioGalaxy as the best thing to happen and unhappen to music in my lifetime. I know do. More importantly, it was deliciously scalable and for the most part it was just a search engine. So don't go writing one without learning some tips from the best.

I'm sure that a little engineering and MG4J could produce a highly scalable search engine. However, I didn't really want to spend that much time on it, so I went with a higher level solution in the form of Lucene for Java. There is also a popular version for Python. I would recommend waiting a while if you're considering using Lucy (Lucene in C with Python and Ruby bindings) because I don't consider it mature. I'd also stay away from layers on top of Lucene like Solr because if you're looking for tools to make Lucene easier to use then you're missing the point that it's already easy to use.

You can read more about using Lucene as a web server here.

So, if you are looking for a good search engine that can search for files check out Lucene.

With the recent addition of 10 languages to the Google AJAX Language API, we have published an update to TubeSpy that includes support for Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

TubeSpy, a recent addition to Ajaxonomy Labs, is a YouTube Spy allowing you to see what videos others are watching on YouTube right now! TubeSpy was built using jQuery, the YouTube API, and more recently, the Google AJAX Language API to add support for other languages.

Visit TubeSpy