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Rich Internet to Soon Replace Static Pages

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Articles, Web20 — Chris Cornutt at 8:43 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

According to the new article on the Tekrati.com site today, ZapThink is suggesting that rich internet applications based around the technologies of Ajax, Flash and Java will be replacing any and all static web sites/applications and portals.

Demand for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and more sophisticated user interaction is increasing dramatically, and enterprise spending on RIA applications will surpass $500 million by 2011, according to ZapThink. The analysts say enhancements to six types of business applications are helping drive RIA spending: high-transaction and event-driven Internet applications, next-generation portals, enhanced business intelligence solutions, application modernization, and Service composition or "mashup" solutions.

They talk about a report ZapThink has put out, showing that an end user experience with Ajax-enabled functionality, a nice interface, and good performance won out over a more traditional page structure. The RIA market is divided up into three submarkets looking at delivering components, environments, and extensions to help make the creation of these interfaces easier. They also mention four "primary means" of implementing these applications:

Adobe Flash virtual machine-based approaches
browser-based approaches that use JavaScript, XML, and other technologies (Ajax)
approaches that use Java applets or ActiveX controls
custom-developed Java or .NET clients

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CSS: The Tech Ajax Forgot

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Ajax, CSS — Chris Cornutt at 8:24 am on Tuesday, August 1, 2006

The shifting sands of time can make people forget things, things they once knew and loved, things they couldn't live without....things important to Ajax too. Michael Mahemoff reminds us of one such thing in his new post - CSS.

CSS is as important to Ajax as Asynchrony and XMLHttpRequest. Which is to say, it's very useful, even though it's not essential. Due to an accident of the English language, JJG's creative mind, and the propensity of certain terms to rise to buzzdom, it doesn't explicitly feature in "A.J.A.X.". However, the original Ajax article certainly spells out the importance of CSS matters.

Michael continues, talking about the real significance of CSS in an Ajax-enabled architecture, noting that it's more than just a way to "cut down on markup". CSS really is a key to several of the features we've come to know and love - just take a glance at Script.aculo.us.

CSS is as integrated into Ajax and Web 2.0 applications as anything yet some seem to forget about some of the other powers that it has. Simple CSS can be found all over, but look at CSS-only layouts and some of the more advanced documentation to see how its power can be used for good for you and your site. I think you'll be impressed.

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IE 7 distrubted in Windows Update

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, IE, Browsers — Dion Almaer at 12:08 pm on Monday, July 31, 2006

The IE 7 team just let us know that IE7 is to be distributed via Automatic Updates!:

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

This doesn’t mean that the old IE’s will disappear in short order, but it nice to see that we may see a quicker uptake to IE 7 than past releases.

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What is Mobile Web 2.0?

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Web20, Mobile — Chris Cornutt at 8:35 am on Monday, July 31, 2006

On the Web 2.0 Journal today, there’s a new article from Ajit Jaokar asking for a real definition of what “mobile web 2.0″ really means.

I see Web 2.0 as the Intelligent web or ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence.’ Mobile Web 2.0 extends the principle of ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence’ to restricted devices. The seemingly simple idea of extending Web 2.0 to mobile Web 2.0 has many facets.

He lists out these facets - restricted devices, building for these devices, and what characteristics can be learned from them. He defines restricted devices in several ways including having one or more of these characteristics - easily carried, battery driven, limited input means, but not wearable.

He gives the iPod as a reference to show a good web/local PC model for mobile devices, a PC-powered interface to provide mobile content to a portable, easy to use device. This is more of a static idea than most think of when they think “mobile web 2.0″. More often, they think of methods to use things such as Ajax in a cellphone’s web browser. He suggests, though, that this is not “mobile web 2.0″ - it lacks the user generated compontent.

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Creating an Ajax Login Page with Dojo/Zend Framework

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Programming, PHP, Dojo — Chris Cornutt at 8:14 am on Monday, July 31, 2006

Alexander Netkachev shows, in this new post on his site, how to create an Ajax-based login page with the help of the Dojo library and a new offering from Zend - the Zend Framework. The Zend Framework is a MVC-based framework written in PHP.

A few days ago I understood the right usage of the framework. Frankly speaking, it does not help with creating Web forms—it has no high-level complex components like TDataGrid in PRADO or even Repeater in ASP.NET. And what I understood is that it is not Zend Framework’s business how developers are creating their forms and here is a reason for this: modern pages are created with a lot of JavaScript and, I believe, are created with client-side components, not server-side.

He set this mission before himself - to create a lightweight Ajax form combining Dojo and the Zend Framework in the easiest way possible.

He assumes you already have both libraries installed (both relatively simple to get working) and gets straight to the code. First off is the creation of the view for the login form itself, the place where the Dojo toolkit is included and the Javascript functionality lives - as well as the simple login form. Next up is the controller for the PHP side, with three actions - a default action, one to perform the login, and the other to show a success message. Finally, there’s the Dojo javascript to make the request to the backend and the PHP script to validate if the username and password are correct.

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IE7 XMLHttpRequest - Native or Not?

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, XmlHttpRequest, IE — Michael Mahemoff at 2:42 pm on Friday, July 28, 2006

MS announced this week that IE7 will be pushed as a high-priority update, so we can expect it to be popular pretty quickly. Reader Shawn Lauriat brought our attention to the question: How native is IE7’s XMLHttpRequest?

The IE team have promoted the new IE7 as including native XMLHttpRequest. This is the case, insofar as you can instantiate an XHR using new XMLHttpRequest(). More importantly than the syntax, XHR will still work when ActiveX has been disabled (unlike IE6 and below).

On the other hand, Shawn notes that some issues exist. Some have pointed out that its more of a native facade than a native Javascript object. Specifically:

xhr.prototype fails. Indeed, it’s reported that any dynamic member creation fails (e.g. xhr.callId = 25; an idiom that can be useful for Call Tracking). If this is still the case, it’s not the behavior of a native object and it’s not consistent with other browsers.
It’s also worth pointing out that IE has an option to disable native XHR. (Aside: can we switch to positive terminology already - “enable” rather than “disable” … it’s hardly a secret of HCI that options should be stated in the positive :-/). The XHR option is, reasonably enough, motivated by security. Although it sounds like XHR will default to enabled (sorry, “not disabled”), it’s still a reality that some users will be continue to be lost if you rely on XHR. Don’t throw out that IFrame just yet!

IE7 XHR - Native or Not?

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Aptana: New Web IDE in Beta

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Ajax, Utility — Dion Almaer at 12:59 pm on Friday, July 28, 2006

Fred Anderson pointed us to Aptana, a new web IDE based on Eclipse.

They provide some nice screencasts of the functionality, and in the documentation they list “hot-To’s” for Many of the frameworks.

Features

Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
Error and warning notification for your code
Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
Cross-platform support
Free and open source. (Source available soon)

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Is Ajax development slowing down?

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Editorial, Ajax — Chris Cornutt at 8:42 am on Friday, July 28, 2006

In his latest blog post, Eric Pascarello asks the question “Is Ajax development slowing down?” Is the shiny new coating of this revolution in web development finally wearing a bit thin, causing people to move on or not innovate like they used to?

I was asked an interesting question by a friend the other day. “Is Ajax development slowing down?”

I noticed the same trend; I just did not really think that it was a big issue. It seems that there is a slow down in the amount of information that is coming out on the net.

He doesn’t seem to think that there is a real slowdown in Ajax development, it’s just a perception. He gives four reasons why this seems so:

It is SUMMER in the northern hemisphere! (more outside, less inside = less code)
Seems like frameworks are maturing and that people are fully developing applications before they release them.
Seems like people are focusing on more of the technical issues of Ajax now and not the wow factors.
It really seems like new developers in the realm of Ajax are taking their time looking at what Ajax has to offer. They are looking at frameworks versus a custom solution.