Phone Gap 1.0 Released

Wanna convert your JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills into mobile apps? Then PhoneGap is the software for you. The 1.0 release is now available.



ReadWriteWeb: Phone Gap 1.0 Launches

Free iPad Ajax Drawing App from 37 Signals

37 Signals has created a cool Ajax drawing app for the iPad called Chalk. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks cool.



Notice that you can create pretty cool stuff without the hassles of the App Store.

What's new in JQuery?

Ajaxian has a good post on what's new with JQuery. Updates to databinding, templating and mobile support.

JQuery Forums Moving Off Google Groups

If you have any questions about JQuery or need, there is a community forum available. The forum was managed on Google Groups, but now has a new software and address at: http://forum.jquery.com/. The new forums use Zoho forums as the back end. John Resig explains his reasoning for the move here.

JQuery 1.4 Released

JQuery has released version 1.4. They are celebrating with this 14 days of JQuery site. Ajaxian has a quick summary of 1.4. Check it out.

JQuery json with .get and .post

I have been testing JQuery's Ajax features a bit late. I noticed that the $.get and $.post Ajax functions didn't seem to support json has a return type. Heck, it is not clear what kind of data the function is expecting.



So I did a little searching around. It turns out that both $.get and $.post have an optional 4th parameter. This allows you to set the data return type to: "xml", "html", "script", "json", "jsonp", or "text". The Code Central Blog has the explanation why the parameter is missing (and it explains why it was not included in some of my reference books). Details of the methods options can be found in the JQuery documentation.

Yahoo Releases YUI 3

Yahoo has released version 3 of their YUI Ajax library. Check out write ups on Webware and the Yahoo blog post.

I haven't tried YUI yet. More a matter of time than anything else. But it looks like a good library.

CKEditor 3 - Rich Text Editor

This is an older post on Ajaxian, but it is new to me and well worth a look. FCKEditor has been around a long time. Its a Javascript based full featured rich text editor. Well it has been updated and renamed to CKEditor 3. Lots of new features including improved performance and a new UI. In addition, it is know accessible and includes full screen reader support.

I highly recommend checking out the demo. A lot of flexibility has been added. Very cool stuff.

An Argument for Web Applications

Ajaxian has this story on why a developer has given up on desktop apps in favor a a Web version. Definitely makes a lot of good points.

Understanding Closures

Found this article on Understanding Closures on webreference.com. Based on my experience, the more closure examples you can look at, the better.

JQuery Cheat Sheets

Being a big fan of cheat sheets, I have started my own JQuery sheet but haven't got far with it. Its still very early days.

If you are looking for a traditional super terse cheat sheet, check out this one on techdreams.org.

Google Elements

During its conference, Google announced its Web Elements services. Bascially, these are really easy to use versions of the Ajax APIs that allow you add functionality to your blog or web site. Click on the service you want, customize it a bit, then add it to your site with the supplied code.

From my quick look at this, only the Map and the News tools look real useful. But overall, this does look very promising for the future./p>

Using the Google Ajax Libraries API

The Google Ajax Libraries API is a caching service for popular JavaScript libraries. Essentially, instead of loading your favorite library from your own web server, you get to use a Google URL to load the library. Since Google has all sorts of caching and edge services, this should load your library and your page much faster. In addition, if other sites use the same service, chances are your lib could already be cached in the browser. So how do you use the service?

Easy Mode

The easiest way to use the server is to just update your script tag to use a Google URL. For example, to use the latest version of JQuery I would simply use this script tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

That is pretty much a slam dunk. Available URLs for JQuery, Dojo, etc... are listed in the documentation.

Fast Mode?

According to Google, the fastest and most flexible way to load the library is with the google.load() method. So the above script tag is replaced with a call to the Google jsapi library. Here is a sample of head section from my JQuery-Examples page.

 4:<head>
 5:  <title>JQuery Examples</title>
 6:  <meta name="keywords" content="jquery, form, val, html, validation"></meta>
 7:  <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="pages.js"></script>
 8:  <?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/in/cssblip.php"); ?>
 9:  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
10:  <script>
11:  // Load jQuery
12:  google.load("jquery", "1.3.2", {uncompressed:true});
13:
14:  function pageLoad(){
15:    // do stuff when DOM is ready
16:
17:    $('table#mainTable tbody tr:odd').addClass('oddTable');
18:    $('table#mainTable tbody tr:even').addClass('evenTable');
19:
20:  }
21:  
22:  google.setOnLoadCallback(pageLoad);
23:  </script>
24:  
25:</head>
26:<body>

Basically, you load the jsapi libary which in turn loads JQuery. Apparently, the compressed version of the library is loaded by default, given that, I added the third parameter to the load method. Firebug tells me that the jsapi lib is 5k and JQuery is about 35k so I think I'm getting the minified version. Also, the documentation suggests I use google.setOnLoadCallback to detect page load instead of the similar JQuery function.

Summary

So to sum up. If you want simple, go with the first option. If you want fastest, go with option 2. Either way, your Ajax enabled pages are gonna load a lot faster. Thanks Google!

App Server Log Reports [object HTMLInputElement] Instead of Text

Ran into this last week, chalk up another bone headed mistake for Mike. :) Once again, I'm hoping this note will help someone else if they run across this problem.

Problem: I'm using dojo.xhrPost to submit a form to an application server. However, when the data shows up on the application server, instead of text, I am getting [object HTMLInputElement]. Perplexing. If I submit the form without Dojo I seem to get text. What's the deal?

Solution: I was updating someone else's code to use a form for submission. The long and the short of it was, the old code uses "content:" to submit the data. The content attribute is used for creating an object literal list of values to submit data. For example:

myVar = {
  param1:"some value",
  param2:"another value"
}

Fine and dandy when you are using something other than a form.

...
content:myVar,
...

So I had changed the code to this, not noticing the slight change in syntax.

...
content:myForm,
...

However, since a form does not submit its data in this way, mayhem ensues. lol. To fix the problem, replace the above with:

form:myForm,

This results in happiness and joy for all.

Ajax/JavaScript Ceritification - Need a few good geeks

If you don't know already, I work in Learning for Sun Microsystems. We are looking at creating an Ajax/JavaScript certification to go along with our existing Java certs. To do that, we generally use real developers developers to define the test objectives and write the questions. And right now we are looking for a few of those folks. So if you have always wanted to say in an interview "I don't have that cert, because I wrote the test." Now is your chance. :)

If you are interested, please add a comment to this post. Please include name, e-mail, your blog/company url, and a phone number so we can contact you. I will pass along your information to the project lead. Since the comments are moderated I will not post any of your information to the Web. This is a limited time opportunity as we need to hear back in the next couple of days. I will remove this post when we have enough people.

And now a word from our sponsor.

---

Need AJAX Experts

My name is Evelyn Cartagena-Meyer and I'm the Java Certification Program Manager. I create all the Java certification exams here at Sun.

I'm in the process of recruiting Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for the Sun Certified AJAX Developer certification exam.

The two phases I need your expertise in, are:

1. Your expertise to help with the creation of the testing objectives for the certification exam. I will need your expertise to participate on con calls to ensure we are testing in the important areas. The con calls will be a one hour call and depending on how far we get, we will proceed to have other calls.


2. A one week item development workshop, which consists of 10-11 top-notch AJAX experts (SMEs). I fly and pay for all the expenses for all SMEs coming to Colorado for the workshop.

The week will consist of writing questions for the certification exam using the testing objectives. Each SME will probably write 8-9 questions per day, so Monday thru Wednesday and then on Thursday and Friday we do a technical review and review all 300 questions created by the SMEs.

Past participants have found this workshop to be an extremely rewarding experience where they get to interact with and learn from other top-notch peers and build relationships that lasts beyond the workshop.

The workshop will be the week of December 8-12 here at the Broomfield Colorado campus.

It would be great to have an expert like you on our team for that week.

I hope you are interested in participating and if you know of any other experts that can participate, can you please send me their names or send them my email?

Please let me know.

Thank you.

Evelyn Cartagena-Meyer

Java Certification Program Manager

---

Unit testing for JQuery

I found this blog post on LosTechies.com about unit testing with JQuery. Well worth a look.

Sun Ajax Development Best Practices

I ran across this link to Sun blueprints today while doing a little background research on a course. Written by Greg Murray, formerly of Sun and now with Aptana, it is a nice little summary of good Ajax programming practice. Well worth saving a link to.

O'Reilly PDF Wonderfulness and Lighter Laptop Bags

As I have hopefully blogged about a little bit, I have been working a lot lately with Ajax stuff and writing a lot of my course content in HTML. Consequently, I am constantly bouncing from Javascript to CSS to HTML to Java to PHP, etc.... Add to this, I have never been that great at remembering syntax. So I often carry around a number of the O'Reilly quick reference books with me. Cause I know what I need to do, but I can't remember correct idiom (References to Monty Python and the Holy Grail welcome). :)

So I often find myself carrying around a bunch of books that I don't really want to carry around. At the Rails conference this really began to bug me cause I'm sure my books were heavier than my laptop.

So at said Rails conference I chit chatted with the nice O'Reilly lady at their booth. This problem came up during the conversion and she mentioned that a number of their books were available as PDFs.

Well I looked into it this weekend and sure enough, most of their books (especially the new ones) have a PDF version. I found replacements for all my quick references: the CSS, HTML, Regex, JavaScript, and SQL. In addition, I found PDF versions of the PHP Cookbook and Mats' Ruby book. My laptop bag has just dropped about 2 or 3 pounds!

The quick references cost between $7 and $10 each. The regular books from $20 to about $35, only a slight discount off the print book. I do think O'Reilly should consider lowering the price of the PDFs a bit. I think they would sell better.

The PDFs themselves have no passwords or DRM on them. Plus they are indexed and searchable!!! Woo hoo! So if you want to lighten that load, head over to their store and check it out: http://oreilly.com/store/

Using Flickr with Dojo Tutorial

Here is another great link from Ajaxian. A short tutorial on Sitepen on how to use Dojo with Flickr.

Free Mastering Dojo Chapters

Finding a ton of stuff on Ajaxian today. They have some links to some chapters from a forthcoming Dojo book. Definitely worth a look.