Palm’s webOS was given a surprise upgrade just a few days ago with the addition of SDL in their 1.3.5 upgrade. Here’s a few stories about the upgrade and what the community did within hours of its release.
Some more reaction from Slashdot is here. Looks like the webOS is heating up a bit. :)
The WebDevRadio podcast did an interview with Frank Zammetti, who has a multi-part series in JSMag on JavaScript development with Palm Pre’s webOS. Have a listen!
Den Bagus has a writeup comparing four open source JavaScript frameworks, and I’d never heard of any of these. Slightly embarrassing to say the least, but we’re all here to learn, right? :)
The four he mentions are Ajax.org, UIZE, Ample and Hemlock. I’ve just started looking at Ajax.org, and will give the others a look too – I’ve been in the market for some of this functionality recently, and was thinking I might have to resort to Flash or Silverlight for some of my needs. Given what I’ve just seen at the Ajax.org demos page, I think there may be enough there to fit my needs nicely.
What are some other client-side JavaScript frameworks that you really love?
As promised, I have packaged up the new javascript plugin for use with OpenBD and you can now download and start playing.
I am personally very excited about this step forward. I always believed that CFML is the best web scripting language out there on the market and when people see how easy it is to do certain things, they are hooked. Coupled with the fact CFML has broken free of it available-only-as-a-commercial-product ties there is a whole new wave of people checking the power out.
So mixing Javascript in as a first-class language to this platform creates a very powerful tool to which non-CFML developers can now crank out dynamic websites without needing to learn a single line of CFML.
By wrapping a single page in CFJS tags, you will be able to write a whole website in Javascript alone, without dropping to a single line of CFML code. I am presently debating whether or not to have a new extension, *.cfjs, that lets you code the whole page in pure-raw Javascript without any CFML tag wrapper at all.
This looks like a cool project. I’m always interested to see how multiple languages are playing together, such as
I’m sure there’s dozens of others – these were just top of mind.
Interested in JavaScript but don’t want to give up your ColdFusion system? Take a look at CFJS.
The YUI team recently released a new version of the YUI Test framework, aimed at the YUI 3.0 library. This article from the YUI blog describes some of the new features in more detail, but probably the biggest feature for many will be the support for mock objects. Developers accustomed to having mock object support in their favorite server-side platform can now bring their mocking skills and expertise to JavaScript in the browser.
This is not to say that mock objects are the only way to go – I’ve heard arguments both for and against mocking for years. But for those that want it, it’s now there in YUI Test. Yes, we’ve had jsmock for some time, and I’m not knocking it. I do think having a good integrated experience for people in the JS testing world will continue to help the adoption of testing practices in the front-end world. The less friction there is in getting started, the more likely it is people will adopt it.
Kudos to the YUI team for your continued success in moving YUI forward. 
The qooxdoo framework recently released its 1.0 version. I remember first looking at qooxdoo back in 2007 when evaluating JS frameworks for a company I was working at. qooxdoo was a bit of a ‘dark horse’ at the time – we ultimately decided on YUI at that point, largely because of the documentation available for YUI (had considered jQuery and others as well).
There seems to have been a huge improvement in qooxdoo in the intervening years, and the framework now boasts an impressive array of features, including a build system, compression, integrated unit testing, internationalization, robust GUI toolkit and more. However, it’s 2009 (almost 2010) and many competing frameworks offer a similar set of features with varying levels of support, so how does qooxdoo gain traction?
The ease with which people can adopt your system and use it to fit their small needs first is (imo) a likely indicator of how much traction a project can gain, and qooxdoo seems to be doing their fair share of making things easy on developers. The most interesting to me is their playground, which gives developers a way to test out qooxdoo code by using provided sample code and editing and running the code, all from the browser – no installation required. Give it a try! A combination of tutorials, ‘getting started’ and a browseable API all will go a long way towards helping developers get a handle on what qooxdoo has to offer.
Congrats to the qooxdoo team on your 1.0 release!
Ben Nadel has released a new JavaScript MVC framework – corMVC. It is intentionally small, doesn’t require any sort of webserver or server-side language, and was “designed to be lowest possible entry point to learning about single-page application architecture”. This looks like it might be a fun little project to play with and learn from, and potentially might grow in to something more.
The Palm webOS team has put together a tool they call “Ares“, a web-based IDE. It looks to be built on the Mozilla Bespin project, which itself is pretty slick, although still a bit too early for me personally to migrate to on a daily basis. If there was a way to incorporate basic code completion and project search, this would probably be enough for many people to switch over as their main JavaScript IDE.
I had a quick play with the Ares IDE and it’s pretty darn slick for a first release. There’s a drag and drop UI builder, which quickly allowed me to piece together a UI with buttons and such, and attach code to various widget events with a minimum of fuss. Previewing the app directly in the browser is quick and painless.
If you’re interested in learning more about webOS development for the Palm Pre, check out Frank Zammetti’s new webOS book and don’t miss his 3 part webOS series in JSMag, starting with December 2009’s first installment.
We’re able to see the first release of Opera’s new JavaScript engine “Carakan”, bundled with the alpha release of Opera 10.5 today. You can read more about the release here, or read more of the details about Carakan in their first announcement about it back in February.
Running the Sunspider benchmark, Opera claims that their Carakan engine is 7 time faster than the engine bundled with Opera 10. I’ve tried the 10.5 release on a Macintosh, and the speed did seem zippier than the previous Opera, but not 7 time faster (and Opera’s blog post confirms that Carakan on the Mac hasn’t been optimized completely yet).
Given the amount of work having gone in to JavaScript engines over the past few years, what new features would you like to see? Personally, I’d prefer to see JS engines be switchable and pluggable in browsers, allowing me to switch in newer engines without having to upgrade the entire browser. That’s probably a pipedream that’ll never come to fruition, but I *can* dream, can’t I?
We’ve had an increasing number of problems related to Google Checkout over the past 2 weeks. If you have an issue receiving your PDFs after paying with Google Checkout, please contact editor@jsmag.com and include the email address you registered with and your Google Checkout receipt and we’ll take care of it ASAP – typically within 2 hours in most cases. We’re working to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible.
