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 framework aside from any success or failure webOS ultimately achieves.

This article explaisn how to build the basic Ajax forms. We will try to understand where we can use Ajax methodology and where we can't.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--jQ.Mobi ( www.jqmobi.com ), a new open source mobile development framework makes its public debut today. jQ.Mobi is a mobile-optimized, HTML5 rewrite of the ubiquitous jQuery framework which is used on over 50% of all ...

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.

The shim, once loaded in a device’s browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server, according to to Shim’s developers. Shim was written in 2011 by Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist at the Boston Globe. The software has been open sourced. Write the Shim originators on git.hub:

Whenever a new page is requested, the page’s URL is broadcast to all connected browsers, which then redirect themselves to that URL, keeping all devices in sync. Shim info is available on git.hub.

Efficient management of the numerous lines of JavaScript code in web applications can be a challenge. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) interactions heavily populate pages to provide a better experience to the user. Single page interfaces, which ...

Jade is a template engine for Node.js

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 interpreter (hphpi). He continues:

We have long been keenly aware of the limitations to static analysis imposed by such a dynamic language as PHP, not to mention the risks inherent in developing software with hphpi and deploying with hphpc. Our experiences with hphpc led us to start experimenting with dynamic translation to native machine code, also known as just-in-time (JIT) compilation … we developed a high-level stack-based virtual machine specifically tailored to PHP that executes HipHop bytecode (HHBC). hhvm uses hphpc’s PHP>AST implementation and extends the pipeline to PHP>AST>HHBC.

He estimates the hhvm bytecode interpreter is approximately 1.6X faster for certain Facebook-specific benchmarks, with still better performance in the offing. But, as described in his blog post on the PHP compilation innovations, there is still work ahead. You can view HipHop-related information at GitHub.

The Accessibility Rules Format 1.0 Specification [1] has been approved by the OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee as an official Specification of OpenAjax Alliance, and unanimous recommendation of approval by the OpenAjax Alliance membership.

The Rule Format 1.0 spec has been under development within the Accessibility Working Group [2] for a couple of years (with early work done in task force stage before an official Working Group was formed last year).

Here is a description of the Rules Format 1.0 Specification:

This document describes the requirements for the structure of OpenAjax Accessibility (OAA) Web validation rules and rule sets used by accessibility test tools. Version 1.0 of this rules format will be used to create validation rules for W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 targeted at HTML 4.X and WAI-ARIA. These rules are targeted at dynamic content and may be applied to a specific Document Object Model (DOM) node or to a set of DOM nodes or the entire document. Rules are to be written in JavaScirpt and rely on the W3C DOM with common browser extensions. Test tools can trigger the evaluation of these rules based on user interaction and external events. To see rule samples, in development, please see [3] or find the sources in the OAA repository on Source Forge [4].

Multiple companies/products that have stated publicly that they are implementing parts of this Specification:

* AInspector – the accessibility inspector for Firefox [5]
* Deque
* Illinois Functional accessibility evaluator 2.0 [6]
* Accessibility extensions for Firefox [7]
* IBM Rational Policy Tester
* OpQuast Reporting Tool [8]
* Parasoft

The co-chairs of the Accessibility Working Group (Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM and Jon Gunderson of University of Illinois) expect that work will continue towards an updated version 2 of this Specification.

[1] http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Accessibility_Rules_Format_1.0
[2] http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Accessibility
[3] http://www.oaa-accessibility.org/rules/
[4] http://sourceforge.net/projects/openajaxallianc
[5] http://code.google.com/p/ainspector/
[6] http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/
[7] http://firefox.cita.uiuc.edu/
[8] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mon.opquast.com

On April 11, IBM and Dojo Foundation announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces. The announcement includes a new Maqetta.org Web site that hosts the Maqetta application [1], and the contribution by IBM of the underlying source code as a new open source project at Dojo Foundation [2].  An eWeek article on the announcement is at [3].

Maqetta uses “OpenAjax Widgets” (the widget metadata part of the OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 specification [4]) .

[1] http://maqetta.org/
[2] http://dojofoundation.org/
[3] http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/IBM-Launches-Maqetta-HTML5-Tool-as-OpenSource-Answer-to-Flash-Silverlight-669762/
[4] http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/OpenAjax_Metadata_1.0_Specification_Widget_Overview

Recent Microsoft updates patched some code that was used by the RPC layer (from the Shindig project) to do messaging on Internet Explorer 6 and 7. OpenAjax Hub 2.0.7 fixes this by disabling the broken transport layer (NIX) and falling back to the fragment identifier transport (IFPC). Some further details can be found at [1] and [2].

[1] http://openajax.org/pipermail/interop/2011q2/001261.html
[2] http://openajax.org/pipermail/interop/2011q2/001262.html

It is likely that yet another update to the OpenAjax Hub open source project will happen sometime soon to include an alternate and faster cross-iframe transport technology for IE6 and IE7 (using Flash under the hood). This alternate transport approach is in the latest Apache Shindig open source trunk. An initial security assessment was done on this new transport approach and so far no security problems have been found.

An exciting new open source project is the Eclipse Orion project. The Eclipse Orion project [1] (developer tools for the Web, on the Web) was announced in Jan 2011 and held planning meeting in March [2], where the Orion team showed the secure and extensible Web plugin technology approach that they are using, using OpenAjax Hub under the hood. Each “JavaScript plugin” gets isolated into its own iframe sandbox, and all communications across plugins are done with pub/sub messaging.

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/orion/
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Orion/Planning_Meeting