Dylan Schiemann

I’m pleased to announce that I recently accepted Aptana’s offer to join their advisory board, along with a number of other great people in the Ajax community. Aptana has just announced the release of Jaxer, dubbed “The Ajax Server.” So what exactly does that mean?

It means that JavaScript, the DOM, HTML, and CSS are now available on the server-side in a solid attempt to unify the development model for developers. There’s a customized version of Mozilla on the server-side that communicates with a standard web server such as Apache, and handles the web application requests. It also means toolkits such as Dojo are available for implementing features with a unified code base across the client and server (validation is probably the hello world example that comes to mind)!

1. Jaxer works closely with a web server to process and serve web content and respond to callback requests.
2. Jaxer reads HTML pages from the web server (Apache, Jetty, etc.) before they’re sent to the browser, processes them, and returns the processed HTML to the web server, which forwards them to the browser — there are no proprietary XML formats or browser plug-ins needed, it’s Ajax all the way.
3. Jaxer integrates the Mozilla engine — the industrial-strength engine that powers Firefox 3 — to provide rich, standards-based, well-tested parsing and APIs for HTML, CSS and JavaScript
4. To allow seamless calling of server-side JavaScript functions from the browser, Jaxer automatically injects a bit of JavaScript wrapper code into served pages. The actual server-side code remains securely on the server.
5. When you call a server-side JavaScript function from the browser, Jaxer wraps the function’s name and arguments in a JSON string, sends them via an XMLHttpRequest back to Jaxer (via the web server), which unwraps the information, calls your server-side function, wraps the results back in JSON, and returns them to the browser, which unwraps them and passes them back as if the server-side function was running right in your browser.

There are a number of great screencasts available as well:
Validation, Server-side DOM, Counter, and Jaxer Studio Features.

A number of very creative approaches make life easier and more powerful for developers of web apps, and Aptana is playing a key role in contributing to this metamorphosis.

Just as most great software comes with an undo command, so should government. The closest thing we have currently in the US is Ron Paul. I’m voting for Ron Paul to undo the major problems caused by the current administration, and much of the governmental policies of the 20th and 21st centuries.

After his presidency, Ron Paul’s nickname can evolve from Dr. No to Dr. Undo!

Congratulations to John Lilly on being named the new Mozilla CEO! John is a great person to work with, and deeply understands the needs of the Open Web. I expect this to be great for Mozilla and for John.

The successes of Ron Paul include $20 million in funds raised last quarter solely from individual contributions by more than 100,000 people. Ron Paul is basically becoming successful for many of the same reasons that open source software and social software have become so effective and popular.

The campaign is truly driven my its active, rapidly growing, disenchanted community. The established candidates are to Microsoft as Ron Paul is to Linux. Ron Paul provides a consistent, open, inviting platform for followers to contribute.

Most of Ron Paul’s success in raising funds and getting the word out has been organized through social networking sites such as Digg, Meet Up, and Facebook. MySpace recently ran an online presidential primary, and Ron Paul was the runaway winner on the republican site. But the social software aspect is apparent in that he has by far the most active and energized offline communities supporting him as well.

Fox News recently tried to exclude Ron Paul from its debate in New Hampshire. Ron Paul funded an on-air town hall forum that was much higher in quality than the Fox debate, and then tonight, he appeared on the Tonight Show where Jay Leno basically told the world that Ron Paul was wronged.

For anyone that believes Ron Paul is unelectable, the same thing was said in 1980 about Ronald Reagan. I’ve never really cared much about politics prior to this election. As many others have said already, “Ron Paul has cured my apathy.”

I had the opportunity to attend my first NFL game ever on December 30th thanks to Torrey. We had amazing seats… first row, 45 yard line, and the Cardinals won easily against the Rams, with their highest scoring performance in 30 years.

The interesting thing about sitting this close to the players is that they felt more ordinary and approachable than I would have expected. I actually felt like I could go out there on the field and compete with these guys. Of course, the next day, I went out and played some football and realized that my mind thinks I’m a much better player than my body does.

Oddly enough, I also feel like the NFL does an amazing job packaging football for TV, as the pace and time between plays feels a lot slower when in person than while watching on TV. This is in contrast with baseball, where I feel the in-person experience runs at a faster pace than it does on TV. Overall, attending a game in person is a great experience, and sitting in the first row is that much better.

Lost in the Christmas rush was the announcement on Christmas Eve that MaxJet has shut down operations and declared bankruptcy. MaxJet was my new favorite airline, providing amazing all-business class service from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or New York to London Stansted. On our trip to Italy in October, we had such a great time on MaxJet that we were a bit disappointed when the flight from Los Angeles was over after “only” 11 hours.

In the end, the straw that broke MaxJet’s back was competitive pressure from American Airlines, which entered their one currently successful market (New York to Stansted). An all-business class service was an amazingly refreshing way to travel for long distance flgihts, and I hope that a revived MaxJet, EOS, or Silverjet will find a way to fill the void of non-stop, all premium service from the US west coast to Europe.

In the recent Mitchell report about baseball and steroids, there is a significant list of circumstantial evidence against many past and present baseball players.

I would still make the case that the ethical dilemma of what is enhancing at what is medicine is still blurred… for example, is a pitcher that receives Tommy John surgery that extends his career and improves the speed of his fastball any worse than taking HGH to stay healthy and extend a career? But I digress… believing the accuracy of the report or the right or wrong nature of performance-enhancements is not the only interesting issue.

The report is missing the list of owners, general managers, managers, agents, player’s union leaders, and MLB executives that were complicit, aware of, or encouraged the use of steroids. The players were not acting alone.

I think any of these non-players would have to be very naive to not have a clue about the situation taking place. And yet, in the public eye, everyone is blaming the players, but not the parties that were complicit in allowing this to happen.

Every few weeks, Google News shows me a new article about Renkoo that is related to wacky internet company names. The latest is one by the Washington Post. I’ve noticed at least 30 iterations of this concept since March of 2006, with the same examples, and each author sadly trying to come up with catch phrases like “how do you tell a company name from a typo.”

From what I recall, this lame series of articles started from the fairly funny Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? quiz, though there is likely prior art. This story has been retold so many times, and rarely does the reporter give credit to the people that originally had some interesting insight on the topic.

If you’re a reporter thinking about writing a story about silly company names, here’s a crazy idea. Do the world a favor, stop writing useless drivel, and starting writing about something useful or interesting instead.

Ajaxian is running a new version of their Ajax survey for those that are interested in taking part in such things.

Andrew Betts has delivered a phenomenal summary of cross site scripting (XSS) techniques and options in today’s browsers in his article Cross Site Scripting Joy.