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Vert.x ramblings: Asynchronous network, your time has come

With the debut of Vert.x, the asynchronous framework is reaching an inflection point, suggests Andrew Cholakian. With Vert.x, the software is packaged together in such a way as to be extremely practical, he states. For some JVM zealots, Vert.x may meet needs recently and apparently addressed by node.js. Vert.x is an asynchronous application server – Read the rest...

Rails cache sweeper redux

Michael Mahemoff writes: To be effective, Rails cache sweepers need to be more fully understood.  They know no standard, so you must employ art. He goes on: Sweepers observe both your models and your controllers, but most workarounds focus on their controller nature.  Importantly: the sweeper must be explicitly added as an observer. Even more Read the rest...

Node.js ? The objective is absolutely fast I/O

Node.js employs an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O model, and it provides some blindingly fast performance to some types of data-intensive Web apps. It is about JavaScript on the server side. LinkedIn, Yahoo and eBay are among ardent Node.js users, and none other than Microsoft has discussed end-to-end JavaScript coverage on its Azure cloud. Read the rest...

Winding road of open-source webOS

HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year?s end.  Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript Read the rest...

Shim uses node.js to test sites on multiple browsers

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic ? this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. Read the rest...

HipHop Virtual Machine for PHP

Facebook Software Engineer and HipHop for PHP team member Jason Evans provides details on Facebook’s move to a new high-performance PHP virtual machine. Described by Evans is ”a new PHP execution engine based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).” He sees it as replacement for the HipHop PHP Read the rest...

Adobe to forgo Flash plug-in for mobile devices

Earlier this week, Adobe VP and General Manager Danny Winokur disclosed that the company has concluded that HTML5 is ”the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” The company said it would stop building Flash to run on mobile browsers. In a blog post on the new focus of Read the rest...

Intel?s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript

Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript, code named River Trail, hooks into on-chip vector extensions to improve performance of Web applications. Details of Intel’s attempt to get on the JavaScript juggernaut emerged last month at its developer event. The prototype JavaScript extension offered by Intel is intended to allow JavaScript apps to take advantage of modern parallel Read the rest...

Adobe buys Nitobi

As it kicked off its yearly developer event, Adobe announced that it had acquired Nitobi Software, maker of PhoneGap open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation ”to ensure open stewardship Read the rest...

A simple random bit on var selector

Isobar’s Rob Larsen suggests that there is often a need to build CSS selectors dynamically when building applications. ”This is typically some existing pattern paired with a loop counter or something pulled from a data attribute,” he writes on his blog. His choice is to create a variable called ”selector” and ”to craft the selector Read the rest...

The power of intent tag discussed

Google developer advocate Paul Kinlan has detailed his recent work on a lightweight sharing facility using a very simple intent share protocol. Web Intents began life in 2010. Now, Kinlan and company are looking for feedback. Basically, his intent tag is intended to allow users to more easily mix and match favorite plug-in capabilities, freeing Read the rest...

Code injection, error throwing

In a blog, Opera Software Developer Relations team member Tiffany B. Brown looks at code injection, error throwing and handling and mobile debugging. She notes Opera Dragonfly and its remote debug features provide a way to debug mobile sites from their desktop. Brown mentions WebKit’s recently added remote debugging capabilities, folded into Google Chrome developer Read the rest...

The State ? Sort of ? of HTML5 Audio

The State – Sort of – of HTML5 Audio Scott Schiller discusses the high level of hype around HTML5 and CSS3. The two specs render ”many years of feature hacks redundant by replacing them with native features,” he writes in an insightful blog. Blogging, he says: CSS3?s border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and gradients, and HTML5?s <canvas>, Read the rest...

Maqetta to the Dojo Foundation

IBM recently announced the open source contribution of Maqetta to the Dojo Foundation. Maqetta provides WYSIWYG authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag/drop assembly, and supports both desktop and mobile user interfaces. Maqetta is said to target user experience designers working in teams focused on  HTML5 application development. The Maqetta application runs in the browser. Read the rest...

Best Practices for test revisited

With Google and their apps like Search, Docs or GMail only a very small time is actually spent in the initial page load, writes Andreas Grabner in a recent blog post. Of course, much time is spent in JavaScript, XHR Calls and DOM Manipulations triggered by user actions. Grabner writes: It is very important to Read the rest...

Searching for public Orion beta?

The Eclipse Foundation now offers sign-up access to a beta version of the OrionHub service, a hosted implementation of Orion tools. Orion is an Eclipse initiative to define a browser-based platform for building and integrating web development tools. Key features of Orion include: a fast editor for JavaScript, HTML and CSS development;  a  client-side plugin Read the rest...

jQuery Mobile Alpha 3 released

jQuery Mobile Alpha 3 increases browser support to include Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile / Mini. Improvements reported on support for iOS, Android, BlackBerry 6, and Palm WebOS. Moreover, the Ajax navigation system has been ? deeply re-factored to improve performance and handle more edge cases. This includes event handling for click, submit, and hashchange, all Read the rest...

Jdrop ? JSON in the cloud

Performance Wonk Steve Souders has announced Jdrop ? described as a JSON repository in the cloud. It builds on his work with Mobile Perf javaScript meta-bookmarklets that can work as profilers for mobile devices. Bookmarklets gather data and display data. The data can be saved to Jdrop. For analysis. Souders blogs: It was pretty simple Read the rest...

Using HTML5 sensibly and multimedia on the web

It is high time developers take back HTML5 from the marketing people, says Chrisian Heilmann. “HTML5 is the evolution of our web technologies, not another flashy add-on to already badly used outdated practices,” he writes in a blog posting that includes illuminating slides. http://www.wait-till-i.com/2011/02/09/using-html5-sensibly-and-multimedia-on-the-web-speaking-at-the-london-ajax-meetup/

Prism work makes way for Chromeless effort

Mozilla Labs announced it will no longer maintain the Prism project. Attention instead will focus on the more general Chromeless project, which also is a ”task-focused layer” running on top of Mozilla’s XULRunner runtime environment. In a blog entitled “Prism is now Chromeless,” Lloyd Hilaiel wrote: “The final change we?re announcing today takes the form Read the rest...

Content courtesy of: ajaxian

Occupy Portland Photos

Making music from machines ? Hacking for the sake of music.

It never ceases to amaze me the ways that people will find to make music. Who would ever think that an old floppy drive could be used to make music? What about a scanner? Or a dot matrix printer? Amazing, and cool.

Javascript fun.

Figure it out… (![]+[])[+!+[]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(!+[]+[])[+!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+([![]]+[][[]])[+!+[]+[+[+!+[]]]]+[+!+[]]+[+![]]+((([+!+[]])

If Kids Were Computers and Parenting By Code

I started thinking tonight, how I wish kids were more like computers. I’d totally write a “take a bath, brush your teeth and go to bed” function. What’s even better, is I’d only have to tell it to run once! It would be a whole lot easier to parent by code. Certainly more efficient and [...]

iTunes + iPhone = Pure suck

I’ve had it with iTunes, and about had it with my iPhone. There’s many reasons why, but here’s an example. I wanted to transfer a 30 second song to my phone. 30 seconds, 432K. Should be as simple as drag and drop. Few seconds worth of time. But here it is two hours later, and [...]

Force Apple Mail to display plain text by default

Testing multipart emails can be a pain when you can’t choose whether you want to see the plain text vs the html version of the email. If you use Apple’s mail client however, you can set a preference on which version you’d like to see by default. Just open up a terminal window and enter [...]

Running PHP cron jobs on a MediaTemple DV server

Recently I was attempting to create some cron jobs to run PHP scripts on a DV server or at MediaTemple, with PHP installed as an Apache module (rather than CGI). I was able to execute the php file, however all of my include and require statements were totally failing. My first idea was to set [...]

Best gift ever

What’s better than a monkey taking a grumpy? A monkey taking a grumpy while reading a book and banging his head to heavy metal. This fantastic little gem is solar powered too. This is way better than a lame-ass bobble head. I just received this gift from a friend upon his return from a trip [...]

Spilling Coffee on your MacBook Pro

I did it. After hearing all the horror stories and thinking it would never be me, I managed to dump a very full cup of coffee on my 17″ MacBook Pro. While attempting to squeeze in a few minutes of work this morning before I left for the office, I accidentally bumped my coffee cup. [...]

The best tractor fight scene evar.

I think that if you looked up the word awesome in the dictionary, it would reference this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6q-m1tLn8

Content courtesy of: /dev/null