January 10, 2008
One of AJAX developers’ first stresses was cross-side scripting. With all these data APIs that are available in XML or JSON, one could easily fetch it with a XMLHttpRequest and parse it right on the client. There are a few hacks around this, being the simpliest a “small proxy script” in the same server your application. Other solution used by many websites that isn’t as simple, but easier to distribute is including code with the script tag since it allows code from other domains. So this is a demanded features.
According to W3C Access Control working draft, Firefox 3 now supports cross-site XMLHttpRequests. You can set a resource to be accessible for all other domains, or specify the ones allowed through the HEADER or the XML way.
I believe now the code will be more equaly distributed between the client and server. Browsers that support Javascript should run in computers with some processing capabilities (even iPhones, Android, WM and even normal phones that will be supporting javascript in a few years) and I can even see some Javascript-only applications using CouchDB as a database (with read-only privileges for external connections).
Only waiting for Microformat support to come out :) And by the way, FF3 is already my main browser in the mac!
January 03, 2008
On the mac, due to the lack of del.icio.us integration with Camino, I switched to Firefox3b2, that is not yet perfect for me (Where the hell is the Microformats support?) and still lacks the del.icio.us integration (that I am handling with favelets), but looks pretty cool, is fast enough and supports this new coolnamed Mozilla service: Weave.
Weave is a service that hosts your favorites (that now have tags) and web history and soon a lot more (integration with your other plugins?). Mozilla starts off providing users other than software, they are offering services, that might lead them to a prosperous future in the 2.0 era. And will they take del.icio.us place for online bookmarking? I guess not. Although Labs.Mozilla is the only provider of weave services for now, they intend to opensource it, and delicious, magnolia and other online bookmarking services will make use of it. And then the competitions wouldn’t be for the best browser integration, but for the best social networking features and innovative experience.
This (temporary, I guess) lack of social features, is what keeps me from using weave as it’s meant to be and keep using del.icio.us (that has a new PHP version coming up for ages now).
July 27, 2007
Some years ago, the Internet users were amazed by the power of Flash and now the world is stumbling upon this new AJAX thing making web pages even more user friendly (and fast!). Another new technologies are also being released like Silverlight and AIR and some others are being prepared, like JaxaFX.
Well, with new standards getting ready like HTML 5.0 and XHTML 2.0, I believe a new generation of client-side scripting will emerge. The projects I feel the most promising are the ones related with the Tamarin Virtual Machine. For those who don’t know, this is the result of the contribution Adobe made, giving Mozilla the source code of Action-Script Virtual Machine. Joining the best of two worlds, Tamarin will have support for both JavaScript and ActionScript.
The first subproject, Action Monkey will integrate Tamarin with SpiderMonkey (the Mozilla’s C implementation of JavaScript). The second, ScreamingMonkey will allow the Tamarin to be run on other browsers, like IE what means portability of the code. The third, IronMonkey will allow Tamarin mapping through IronPython and IronRuby. Regarding this last one, as an OpenSource foundation, Mozilla should be using Python and Ruby rather than Microsoft’s ones.
All of this will be released with SpiderMonkey and Firefox next year. Can’t wait to try and make some nice looking applications with it :)
