Categories
AJAX Firefox Plugins JavaScript Venkman Web Browser

Firebug 1.0 Beta

I’ve been playing with the Firebug 1.0 private beta for the last few days and it’s quite a tool. v0.4 the last release of Firebug had already combined the most popular features Venkman, Console2, and the DOM inspector. 1.0 adds a entire new set of features. JS profiling and Net request tracing similar to Tamper Data are IMHO the most powerful. Joe has been hard at work and been fising issues as quick as we find them. Firebug now has enough functionality that it could implement and examine all the tips included in my entire presentation at OSCON.

The new website Get Firebug gives you a glimpse of what is coming shortly:

Categories
AJAX JavaScript

Faster DOM Queries

Dean Edwards has posted a demo with a cross browser way of super quick DOM queries.

Limitations

* As described earlier, speed improvements only apply on page load for IE. Further DOM queries will use the original getElementsBySelector function
* the speed of CSS2 queries (attribute selectors) are not improved for IE5/6
* because of the nature of the CSS hack, you can only apply one behavior per element 🙁

Conclusion

* DOM queries on Firefox seem pretty quick
* XPath is about 150% faster than DOM queries on a Mozilla platform
* XPath is about 1000% faster than DOM queries on an Opera platform
* the expression hack is about 200-400% faster on an IE platform
* Behaviour leaks like a sieve

Categories
AJAX Email

Gmail Whoas

Gmail and Talk have been having some trouble again. It’s been slow more often than not and I captured a few more *error modes*. Today I saw Gmail chat recover Google Talk - We're Back! with this little gem. Hey at least they recognized they are back. Seems I’m not the only one who has had trouble with gmail recently.

Gmail greeted me with this screen for a couple hours today.
Gmail Server Error

Seems now that the day is over things are back to normal and Gmail is happy. Well tomorrow is another day… we’ll see how the big G holds up.

Categories
AJAX

500 Mashups

ProgrammableWeb.com now has over 500 mashups listed.

As shown on Mashup Feed the average new mashups per day is up to 2.81. And that is just those added to the database here. This is up from 2.6 or so just about 8 weeks ago.

So looks like it may hit 1000 before the year end.

Categories
AJAX JavaScript Web Browser

JSONRequest

JSONRequest has been proposed by Douglas Crockford as a new native method for web browsers to exchange data with servers. The biggest notable difference with XMLHttpRequest is that it doesn’t prevent requests to multiple domains. JSONRequest can make requests to any server, not just the origin server like the current XMLHttpRequest. Web applications today that need to make cross-domain requests must use a proxy or a dynamic script tag to make requests to non-origin domains.

JSONRequest also has provisions for long lasting server initiated, live push of data. Crockford calls this “Duplex”.

“JSONRequest is designed to support duplex connections. This permits applications in which the server can asynchronously initiate transmissions. This is done by using two simultaneous requests: one to send and the other to receive. By using the timeout parameter, a POST request can be left pending until the server determines that it has timely data to send.

Duplex connections can be used in real time notification applications such as process management and finance. It can also be used in collaborative applications such as instant messaging, instant email, chat, games, presentation, and shared applications. “


Alex Russell
calls this same server-push technique Comet. I actually like Comet a bit more than Duplex. Duplex is a bit overloaded with a few other uses in tech. Like the half or full duplex with configuring network cards or terminal echo. Not as if I have a vote(just like AJAX sotra stuck), but let’s hope Comet wins.

Categories
AJAX Email JavaScript

Gmail chat problems

I’ve noticed a few errors in gmail’s new chat interface. The gmail quick contacts are not always up-to-date. Just yesterday I got this this error message:

gmail_chat_quick_error.jpg

It’s a new service, so not too surprised that chat is seeing a few bumps. In fact it’s expected. I remember the first few versions of meebo(a web based chat interface for Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Jabber), and the problems they ran into. One positive aspect of the chat problems are that gmail is unaffected. Email continues to work and is performing well. They’ve integrated it in such a way that quick contacts can fail or be unavailable (like above) but fail gracefully. Many popular web apps, even recent web 2.0 and AJAX apps don’t seem to be designed this way. They fail and fail completely. Designing AJAX apps that can handle partial failures is hard. Many of these app have deep callback stack to get the JavaScript to perform and work seamlessly. There are parallel asynchronous java script calls that need to be requested and handled in whatever order the server responds. So each piece of functionally needs to be carefully crafted to be independent and self sufficient. You need to think about how your app will act if it fails, or worse partially fails. Can it continue to work if it misses a server response or two? Can it error gracefully and continue to work when only a partial set of server functionality is available? This is especially important for companies building desktop replacement applications in which users will rely on for their day to day or even hour to hour work. So take a note from gmail and talk, build apps that are robust to temporary failures. If partial server functionality is available continue to process work and user interaction on the rest of the app. Gracefully poll the server checking for when the full functionality is returned. The error above recovered on it’s own without a reload or restart of the webapp. Impressive to say the least.

On a side note, Gmail itself has been rock solid for me ever since I started using it in June 2004. The spam filters are pretty good, but not perfect (more on that later), and it’s hard to beat the speed of the interface. It’s not the most feature rich mail or collaboration implementation out there but for a small mail volume it does a good job. Works perfect for my personal mail (40-50/day), but I’d have a hard time using it as my primary webmail client for work(200-300/day). I just get too much mail each day for gmail to be useful. It’s missing a few key features to manage extremely large daily mail volume. Saved searches and IMAP support being the first two that come to mind. I need a way to quick search on the same data multiple times a day. Labels work well to automatically categorize and simulate folders but can’t replace a rich search with the option to save. IMAP is a must have for off-line access. POP just doesn’t cut it when you want the server to be your *master* mail store.

Categories
AJAX JavaScript

AJAX Amazon Music Search

Put together an AJAX demo using Amazon’s webservice API. Basically type in an artist name or song title and it’ll return the first 10 hits from Amazon’s music search. It’s using script.aculo.us for the ‘Grow’ effect when the results return. the search itself is triggered via java script, and parsed locally. The result also triggers a contextual AdSense ad. Tried a few different ideas and seems an embedded iframe worked best. My goal was to make it work without a page reload. So to get an AdSense ad that is contextual to the search I needed to generate a url and title string from the query itself. Anything else seemed to lead to generic ads. I’m sure there are ways to improve on it. If you’ve got an idea leave a comment!


AJAX Amazon Music Search

Categories
AJAX

YubNub Suggest – Reloaded (Dojo)

First YubNub Suggest example used script.aculo.us. This time tried Dojo’s autocomplete code. Smoother auto complete, including support for arrow keys, but has a harder time selecting an option. Doesn’t seem to like space as a keystroke selector. You can try it out for yourself.

YubNub Suggest (Dojo)

Categories
AJAX

AJAX Auto Complete

Few sites these days are using AJAX Auto Complete to help users filter known choices or reduce typing.  As more AJAX libraries are released this practice should appear more frequently. Autocomplete generally comes in two flavors; Local Auto Complete and remote or server based auto complete.  Local auto complete loads all the data locally into memory and then parses/pages through the data entirely in JavaScript.  Server based auto complete like Google Suggest send async queries to a server as the user types.  Local autocomplete works well when the entire data set is small enough to process at once think hundred’s or thousand’s or items.  Ten’s of thousands may be possible depending on how complex the data and what type of matching is used.  Prefix matching requires less processing that a full search for prefix, sufix, and contains matches.  The Yahoo UI Team has posted a design pattern on Auto Complete and plan to release code as part of their UI Library. script.aculo.us includes support for both Local and Server autocomplete.  They have a few demos posted that you can try yourself.

UPDATE: A couple demo’s of my own:

YubNub Suggest
Dojo Autocomplete

Categories
AJAX JavaScript

YubNub Suggest

YubNub has been around for sometime. I went looking for a Suggest version that would autocomplete common commands. I did a few searches and all I came up with was DashNub which is an OSX Widget.  Using script.aculo.us‘s autocomplete code and the XML feed for the YubNub Golden Eggs. My YubNub example now has basic autocomplete.  Any YubNub command can be used but autocomplete only works for the 400-500 Golden Eggs.

YubNub Suggest

Note:
 – It’s only been tested in Firefox 1.5.01

TODO:
 – Test in other browsers
 – Add descriptions to each command
 – Allow selecting with arrow keys