June 21st, 2008 by Dylan
Three great Dojo books are now available for sale:
Each book has a slightly different target… I highly recommend all 3. In my opinion, James Harmon’s book is better geared towards people new to JavaScript, while Matthew Russell’s book is the most complete of the set.
June 17th, 2008 by Dylan
Firefox 3 launches today, with significant upgrades across ever facet of the web browser, from chrome (a much improved address bar, bookmarks system, and more easily searchable password and cookie managers), to significant rendering and JavaScript engine performance improvements.
At this point, Safari and Firefox are in a battle of the ages for performance and ease of use. At the moment, in my opinion, Safari is winning on that battle, due to Apple’s investment to make the iPhone the ultimate platform, but Firefox has such a healthier community of add-ons and development tools that I continue to use Firefox for most of my daily web use.
I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the last alpha release, and I’m very pleased with the progression they have made. There are still some annoyances (can’t we get rid of dialogs completely and move everything to the page header like the style done for saving passwords and displaying popups… dialogs across tabs for cookies are annoying, but not as annoying as allowing ad tracking cookies), and yet it is the world’s most advanced web development platform today, and still my browser of choice.
The announcement of Firefox 3.1 later this year is a great sign that we can expect browser improvements more frequently, rather than waiting a year or two between major improvement cycles. Congrats to the entire Mozilla Community on this great release!
June 5th, 2008 by Dylan
Sorry Obama fans, as a libertarian, there’s no way I can in good conscience support someone that said:
We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.
The last thing the world needs is the government or the UN telling us what we can and cannot do.
Even worse:
Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.
The government’s job is not to tell us what we can do, or how it will spend our hard earned money.
When George Will was on the Colbert Report the other night, he said that liberals believe in equality, and conservatives believe in freedom.
Conservatives understand that the government’s job is to deliver the mail, defend the shores, and get out of the way.
Sadly, the neo-conservative candidate John McCain does not actually believe this, so we’re left with two really bad choices. Other than voting for the libertarian or constitutional party candidates, we’re badly missing out on the only real choice:
.
I guess I’m still holding out hope that our country will wake up.
May 11th, 2008 by Dylan
I recently picked up Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: A Manifesto”. I’ve made my way through the first two chapters which do a great job of simply explaining the problems with our government. A few of the highlights include, for example, the 1996 election won by the Republican
party:
The Contract with America was typical of what I have just described: no fundamental questions are evan raised, and even supposedly radical and revolutionary measure turn out to be modest and safe. In fact, the Brookings Institution in effect said that is this is what conservatives
consider revolutionary, then they have basically conceded defeat.
Basically the Republican party campaigned on a platform of change, and then changed nothing. That sounds a lot like the 2006 Democratic campaign actually…
Needless to say, I am also unimpressed by the liberal Left. Although they posture as critical thinkers, their confidence in government is inexcusably naive, based as it is on civics-textbook
platitudes that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality.
I have long been bothered by the assumption that it is the government’s responsibility to fix every thing that is wrong with the world, from healthcare to foreign aid. Frankly, I don’t trust the government’s
ability to spend my hard earned money better than I spend it, nor do I agree with giving the government the authority to look out for the best interests of “society”.
Watching candidates “debate” this past election season was beyond painful, because the debate was pointless at best:
No wonder frustrated Americans have begun referring to our two parties as Republicats. And no wonder the news networks would rather focus on $400 haircuts than matters of substance. There are no maters of substance.
To sum things up, I leave you with thoughts on what government’s role should be:
When we agree not to treat each other merely as means to our own selfish ends, but to respect one another as individuals with rights and goals of our own, cooperation and goodwill suddenly become possible for the first time. My message is one of freedom and individual rights. I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should only be used defensively. We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion. That, and not a desire for “economic efficiency”, is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason.
I highly recommend picking up a copy of The Revolution as this book does an amazing job of simply focusing on the issues that matter and cutting through the common rhetoric and political platitudes we normally read and watch.
April 28th, 2008 by Dylan
One of the cool perks of my role on Aptana’s Advisory Board is that I get to learn about some of the great things they are working on. Today, Aptana has announced Aptana Cloud, including coverage by eWeek, the missing piece in their strategy of making web apps really easy to deploy. While the name implies that this is a lot like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services, or Google’s App Engine, and in some ways it is, it’s nice in that it makes it really, really easy to use Aptana Studio + Jaxer + your JavaScript toolkit of choice (Dojo, jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, etc.) + your server-side toolkit of choice, and get a web app deployed pretty easily at a reasonable cost. People might also do this to get their latest Facebook or OpenSocial app idea out the door. Regardless, these solutions make the start-up cost of server operations negligible compared with just a couple of years ago.
April 24th, 2008 by Dylan
At SitePen, we’ve just added two new resources:
These guides were developed by the SitePen support team.
April 15th, 2008 by Dylan
A lot has changed for the better since my post four years ago on preventing the death of SVG.
Today, we have excellent SVG (and canvas) implementations in Safari, Firefox, and Opera. dojox.gfx provides a simple JavaScript API based on SVG nomenclature for abstracting away inconsistencies between implementations, and also allow VML and Silverlight support for IE browsers.
Lately, Apple has been taking an interesting approach of leveraging key SVG stylistics features and exposing them through CSS: CSS gradients, CSS transforms, and CSS animations. What’s really interesting is that some of the best features of SVG are making their way into HTML+CSS.
I’m starting to wonder if the future of SVG for the most common 80% is just HTML, CSS, a few new shape and path elements, and some additions to the HTML coordinate system.
March 27th, 2008 by Dylan
More information is available in the Dojo 1.1 release notes, or on the SitePen Dojo 1.1 announcement.
Be sure to check out the new Dojo API Viewer, and the growing collection of Dojo demos, tutorials, and articles.
Update: The Beauty of Dojo 1.1 by James Burke, and Dojo 1.1 released announcement by Peter Higgins.
March 26th, 2008 by Dylan
I love redundant typos in news headlines: “Inventor of McDonald’s Egg McMuffin inventor has died (at CNNMoney.com)”
March 13th, 2008 by Dylan
Over the years of working with the Dojo Toolkit at SitePen, we have avoided offering a formal support service because we did not want to compete with our efforts in supporting the community. Recently, we started to realize that there are simply cases where an open and free community cannot always fill the need of support:
When Joe Walker joined SitePen in November, the plan was to eventually offer Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd support. Eventually is here now, as we are pleased to announce SitePen Support for these technologies as well as others that build on top of the great open source projects to which we contribute.
Our support offering goes beyond the typical expectations and gives you access to key people involved with building great open source software. Depending on the support package selected features include:
Finally, we believe that offering great support will allow us to invest more time and effort into making these great open source projects even better, through the form of more bug fixes, features, and increased documentation and contributions to the project forums and mailing lists.
For more information, visit SitePen Support
Dylan SchiemannDojo, Ajax, Comet, and Random Musings