Archive for the ‘web-development’ Category

Mozilla Bespin: web-based code editor on web technologies

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Bespin — an experiment from Mozilla Labs that possibly will propose an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

At this time we have initial working experimental prototype that we can use to understand concepts of Bespin and the possibilities that it opens up.
The protorype includes support for basic editing features, such as syntax highlighting, large file sizes, undo/redo, previewing files in the browser, importing/exporting projects.

As for me idea of web-based code editor is arguable due to we have enough excellent standalone open-source code editors like Netbeans [http://www.netbeans.org/] or Eclipse [http://www.eclipse.org/] that have good collaboration possibilities. Standalone code editors we can develop using pretty object-oriented languages like Java and don’t bother with Javascript. But time will say its word.

Mozilla wants you
The Bespin experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved: [https://bespin.mozilla.com/]

Tags: bespin, editor
Posted in general programming, internet, web-development | No Comments »

Firefox 3.0.5: how to fight caching issue

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

If you are web-developer you probably already heard about regression bug in recent Firefoxes, event latest Firefox 3.0.5 is affected.

Bug is described here on Bugzilla [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441751], it is fixed, and should be available in new version of Firefox.

As the bug description notes Firefox ignores cache control attributes so we can’t just use them:
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires: Sun, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache

Rare case is you need to tune cache then you can use browser.cache.check_doc_frequency parameter [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.check_doc_frequency] that can be accessed with about:config URL.

But for others question is what to do right now, event with new version of Firefox we can’t ask users to update their Firefoxes.

There are 2 solutions that we have found and tested:

1. If you want to make Firefox to reload some page
You can generate new URLs for any cache sensitive resources every time.
Add some insignificant parameters to URLs: http://www.google.com/something?aaa

2. If you need to make some actions within some page,
for example you need to provide an unique attribute for images in Ads campaign.
You can use Javascript to generate it.
Firefox uses same page but execute Javascript everytime.

You can use following code to generate random number:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

I hope men will update their browsers fast so we will not stick with that like with IE6.

Tags: caching issue, firefox
Posted in general programming, web-development | No Comments »

RubyConf2008 conference

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

If you are real Ruby follower you surely know about RubyConf2008 conference that was held in November 2008, or perhaps you even participated. If you still miss all the fun you can go thru whole list of videos from that conference on [http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/].

Or at least you can watch videos I’ve selected for busiest men:

name: Reasons behind Ruby
duration: 31 minutes
description: introductory speech from Yukihiro Matsumoto, father of Ruby where he speaks about Ruby, its future, and community in general without any technical stuff.
URL: [http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/matzs-keynote.html]

name: Fork Ruby
duration: 48 minutes
description: speech from Dave Thomas that helped write Agile Manifesto, and Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide. He share thoughts about possible ideas for Ruby language and its development.
URL: [http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/keynote.html]

name: Ruby 1.9: What to Expect
duration: 50 minutes
description: Dave Thomas and David Black author of popular book Ruby for Rails, Ruby core contributor and the creator and maintainer of RCRchive show to us differences between Rubys with 2 irb windows step by step.
URL: [http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/ruby-19-what-to-expect.html]

name: Recovering from Enterprise
duration: 45 minutes
description: Comparison between Ruby and Java worlds from Ruby, and Ruby on Rails contributer Jamis Buck. He describe fundamental differences between Java and Ruby and his mistakes, and ways to avoid them. Also provide ideas how to write in real Ruby and not in Java with Ruby syntax.
URL: [http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/recovering-from-enterprise.html]

Next conference will be held on 13-14 March of 2009 in Salt Lake City.
See details on official site: [http://mtnwestrubyconf.org/]

Tags: conference, RoR, ruby on rails
Posted in ruby, web-development | No Comments »

Understand Web with MAMA

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Preamble

Did you ask you mam in childhood about nature of things? Yeah, who did not..
And now Opera software [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software] presented MAMA – the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application. It is analytical search engine that returns details of page structure.

How can we use use it?

“We at Opera believe this tool can also be useful to other stakeholders in the standards and browser-making world.
For example:
Browser manufacturers and others can use MAMA data on the popularity of widely used technologies to prioritize bugs and justify adding support for new technology to in-progress releases.
Standards bodies can use the data to measure the success and adoption rates of various technologies.
Web developers can use the same data to justify support of various technologies in their work.
It can provide real-world, practical samples of the Web developer’s “art”, for inspiration and instruction.”
According to MAMA project documentation

Some details

MAMA give us answers on questions like: how many sites use CSS (80,4% by MAMA), how many errors on average page (47), how many symbols on average page (16,400), which country the most use XMLHttpRequest, an important component of AJAX? (Norway, 10.2%).

Or more sophisticated: how many sites adapted for mobile gadgets, how much Web2.0 spread, what version of HTTP protocol more popular and so on..

MAM is active project and so with the lapse of time we will get bigger range of data. That will give us possibility to understand Web tendencies and Web better.
So thanks Mama.

Related links links to get details:
Mama project description: [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/]
Mama key findings [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/]

Tags: internet, web, web-development
Posted in general programming, internet, web-development | No Comments »

HTML 5: Seeing is believing

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

preamble

We have lived with HTML5 drafts for 4 years, last draft was published on 27 September 2008.
HTML5 has big number of features and probably will be major change of HTML for all history of Web.

Most prominent features are: Scripting API additionally to regular markup, and number of new APIs: Timed media playback, Storage, Offline work support, Drag and drop, Messaging/Networking, Back button management.
You can look at article on wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5] and at current draft [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/] for more details about HTML5.

Come along

Many different words about HTML5 were already told, and we know that seeing is believing.
So today we have possibility to watch some of already implemented features of HTML5 thanks to Ian Hickson, Google employee that “heavily involved in Google’s work with the W3C, representing Google on the CSS working group and reviewing specifications of other working groups (SVG, CDF, etc)” according to Ian site [http://ian.hixie.ch/]

Following video include subsequent features:
* <video> (00:35)
* postMessage() (05:40)
* localStorage (15:20)
* sessionStorage (21:00)
* Drag and Drop API (29:05)
* onhashchange (37:30)
* Form Controls (40:50)
* <canvas> (56:55)
* Validation (1:07:20)

You can find detailed notes on: [http://www.whatwg.org/demos/2008-sept/]

Tags: html5, internet, web
Posted in internet, web-development | No Comments »

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