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Blogs ยป Archive for September, 2005
The Mozilla Developer Center
The Mozilla Developer Center (affectionately known as Devmo) is one of web development’s best kept secrets. The site describes itself as a Mozilla project dedicated to providing documentation, education, and community for developers of all types. What that means is extensive articles and tutorials on a wide range of important techniques - Ajax, CSS, SVG and much, much more.
Behind the scenes, the site is running a beautifully templated version of MediaWiki - the best-of-breed wiki software originally developed for Wikipedia. Registration is required before you can contribute, but there’s plenty to do if you can spare some time for the project. The site has a small but active community, and the quality of the content is extremely high. Well worth exploring.
XMLHTTP to go native, and other IE7 goodness
AJAX developers, rejoice! Microsoft has officially announced that XMLHttpRequest will be a native object in IE7, meaning it will work even when ActiveX support has been disabled in the browser for security reasons. This brings the browser’s support for remote scripting–the technology at the heart of AJAX applications–up to the same standard as that offered by Firefox, Safari, Opera, and similar browsers.
Once IE7 is widely adopted, this will help to eliminate a lot of cumbersome browser detection code that is currently required to implement AJAX across all popular browsers.
Another similarly welcome announcement is that the select element (used to create menus and drop-down lists) will be a lightweight component in IE7, meaning that HTML elements (such as DHTML pop-up menus) will be able to overlap these menus and lists and correctly obscure them when they do. Currently in IE6 and earlier, menus and drop-down lists always appear on top of all other HTML content unless you use one of several rather ugly hacks to work around the problem.
Finally, fans of the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox will be pleased to hear that Microsoft are about to release a beta of their own Web Developer toolbar for IE6 or …
Learn J2EE programming with passion
Ready to get serious about learning Java Web application and enterprise application development? I can’t say I blame you — those skills will net a pretty penny in the current job market. That’s why J2EE Programming (with Passion!), a free online class offered by Sun Microsystems employee Sang Shin in his spare time, is such an amazing opportunity.
Offered by means of a Yahoo! Groups discussion list, the class runs for about the length of a university semester. Once you subscribe, you’re responsible for reviewing the weekly pre-class reading material, reading the classroom slides with accompanying notes, and completing the assigned coursework and final project by the assigned dates. It’s just like taking a university class only you don’t have to show up at lectures… oh, and did I mention it’s free?
If you’ve been awaiting an opportunity to learn J2EE in a structured way without shelling out a bunch of money on books and classes, this might just be the ticket. Sang Shin also offers a few other online classes, an advanced J2EE class among them.
The next session of J2EE Programming (with Passion!) starts September 26th. Time permitting, I plan to participate.
Quark Are Different… Kinda
I’m probably stretching the connection to design here, but I thought this was worth at least a chuckle.
With Adobe’s InDesign receiving quite a bit of positive press in recent times, Quark appear to have responded in part by freshening up their branding — a worthwhile step to get people to take a fresh look at you.
However, while simple logos are often beautiful logos, by definition there isn’t much to them. As pointed out by Josh Pigford (RockNRollPig) in the forums, their new logo bears an unfortunate resemblance to a couple of pre-existing logos.
Answer: Which designer makes more money….
Thanks for your posts about the two designers — one your classic artist and one your classic template developer — and which makes more money.
In this case, Designer 1, the artist-type, makes more money. He is a better marketer than designer 2. While Designer 2 works alone, Designer 1 has built a firm of employees and contractors that work under his guidance. He markets primarily via referrals — from clients who love his work and rave about him.
But wait, before you post to argue…..
There are basically three business strategies that any firm can follow (based on The Discipline of Market Leaders by Treacy et al):
- Be a product leader, like Nike or Intel. Designer 1 is a product leader, with custom, beautiful work that leads the market.
- Be operationally excellent, like Walmart or Southwest. Designer 2 follows this strategy, with repeatable products at a good price, and lots of volume.
- Be customer intimate, like IBM. These firms serve a broad range of their client’s needs. They may not have the best products or best operations, but can handle soup-to-nuts needs of their clients. The person who posted that they are Designer 1 and brother is Designer 2 may be in …
Zimbra AjaxTK: A toolkit for AJAX-powered GUIs
Though you may not be in the market for the complete email and collaboration server replacement that is Zimbra (see my previous post), there are always goodies tucked away inside large open source applications like this one. One such goodie is the Zimbra AJAX Toolkit (AjaxTK).
It’s still early days for Zimbra and complete documentation is still forthcoming, but there is a whitepaper available that documents AjaxTK from a rather technical standpoint.
In short, AjaxTK is a library written entirely in JavaScript that lets you write desktop-style graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with components like buttons, menus, tabs, toolbars and more… all while avoiding the complexities of cross-browser DHTML compatibility headaches.
The library of components included in AjaxTK is called the DHTML Widget Toolkit (DWT), and includes all the basic GUI components you would expect if you were coming from a desktop application development background. The included components provide for proper event handling, drag-and-drop operations, tooltips, and more, and the framework is designed such that you can write your own custom components that inherit these facilities as well.
As far as the actual AJAX functionality of the framework, server communications are neatly abstracted in to a set of networking classes, as well as …
Flash Player 8 Final released
Particularly if you installed the beta, but also for vastly improved performance, you’ll want to grab the final version of Flash Player 8 as soon as possible.
Zimbra: Gmail and Exchange meet Open Source, Java and AJAX
Zimbra is either the coolest thing I’ve seen this month, or too good to be true. I haven’t decided which yet.
Previously known as Liquid Systems, Zimbra is the new name of the company, as well as its flagship product: an extensible open-source client/server system for managing email, contacts, and calendaring that can be accessed with either a slick, cross-browser, AJAX-powered user interface, or via desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, and others.
The server that powers all this, Zimbra Collaboration Server, is written in Java, and sits upon familiar open source components like a MySQL database, a Postfix Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) (with SpamAssassin and ClamAV for anti-spam and anti-virus by default) and a Tomcat Web Application Server.
Although the services provided by Zimbra (mail, contacts, and calendaring) are all accessible with desktop applications (see above) via the open standards that exist for these things, Zimbra also provides its own cross-browser, AJAX-laden, Web-based user interface. This UI supports many of Zimbra’s “extra” features, such as message tagging, unified search, email rendering plug-ins (e.g. linking your company’s invoice numbers to your order tracking system when they appear in email messages, or integrating services …
The Future is SVG - So Very Good
The image you see at the left isn’t particularly remarkable — a nice little Illustrator drawing exported to JPG for the sake of displaying it online. It goes without saying that the JPG’s compression has slightly reduced it’s fidelity to the original, while it has also inherited none of the original’s ‘editabililty’.
However, if you happen to be running the latest Firefox 1.5 beta, you can now view the very same graphic in all it’s ‘vectorific’ glory right in the browser - sans plugin or extensions.
If you haven’t got 1.5 you’ll see the almost as elegant markup that constructs the image.
It looks like this, but more:
SVG is a lovely readable language. Skimming through the code, it isn’t difficult to get a reasonable idea of what it’s doing.
In fact, if you do keep your Firefox updated, there are many more interesting SVG examples available at Croczilla, including some simple animation, editable splines and even a very serviceable tetris.
The nice thing about Illustrator is it not only allows you to export in SVG (since V8.0 I think) but actually reads it natively — this all of a sudden …
Guess which web designer makes more money…
I’m working directly with two web designers right now. Guess which one makes more money:
Designer One: This guy is a true artist. He likes to take on difficult web design challenges. His work is gorgeous (so good in fact that it is hard to convert his Photoshop products into HTML). He can’t manage deadlines very well, and is a bit tempermental. Everything he does is custom, and can take months to complete. He charges lots of money per job, and is worth it for his great custom work.
Designer Two: This guy knows how to create web sites that have that direct marketing look and feel. He can mix and match existing elements to create a decent looking web site. His work is not very original. In fact, he likes to create a template and crank out work that is 80% the same and 20% customized. On the downside, he is a bit sloppy and tends to overlook details like typos. He also doesn’t like requests from clients to really redo the look and feel of a site he has created. But his sites look professional and get response. And he is much faster than Designer One, even though he charges …
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