Entries from February 2008 ↓

Sergey Surikov has a great tutorial today on JavaLobby/DZone on writing a JavaFx application that takes advantage of a full-screen animation as well as transparency. Very cool effects! If you’re writing JavaFx applications, these are definitely tools you’ll want to add to your toolbox.

Two JavaScript related posts for you this morning. The first post comes from John Resig entitled “JavaScript Performance Stack“. In this post, John goes over how JavaScript interacts with the different parts of a browser engine and will give you an idea of how these parts are connected and related to each other. The second post comes from dow.ngra.de and is a list of JavaScript puzzlers. These are along the same lines as the Java Puzzlers book Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter put out; interesting bits of code that look harmless, but do something unexpected when run.

Paul Annett of Clearleft has a tutorial post on Vitamin today stepping the reader through a recreation of the parallax CSS design trick from Silverbackapp.com. Parallax scrolling for a website involves overlaying png images to give the page a 3D look.

Gustavo Duarte writes today about Reality Driven Development. This is meant to be a further explanation of a post of his that got Slashdotted last week. It’s a good read that advocates experimenting during the software process and getting feedback (from reality/the user) often.

Jeff Atwood has an interesting article this morning on Coding Horror regarding what kind of user feedback is useful. He isn’t saying to ignore the user all together, but rather use their feedback in conjunction with hard data collected by watching what the user is doing when using the application.

Gojko Adzic has a list of Test Driven Development anti-patterns on his blog. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many of these crimes practiced in real life and can say that they generally always come back to bite you. The list includes activities such as commenting out a test to make the build pass, sensitivity to the UI, and sensitivity to 3rd party APIs.

Yesterday was a big day for those contemplating taking Adobe AIR out for a spin. Ext, YUI, and Dojo all now have support for the runtime. Pete Freitag posted a hello world tutorial on his website to help get you started. You will also want to take a look at the Adobe Resource Center section on developing AIR applications with HTML and Ajax.

Not to be a buzz-kill, but please keep in mind that Adobe AIR still does not support Linux. However, they are actively seeking out beta testers for a Linux version of the runtime.

Jack Slocum posted an update to the Simple Tasks example application to the Ext blog this morning. This is an example app using Ext 2.0.2 as well as Adobe AIR. With Adobe finally releasing a version 1.0 of its AIR runtime, this is a good example to check out if you’re thinking of taking AIR for a spin.

The Python team released version 2.5.2 over the weekend. This is a bug-fix release. For a more detailed list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

Adam Gotterer has released a modified version of the Prototype JavaScript library that is compatible with XUL. Hopefully we’ll soon start seeing XULRunner get some more traction against other RIA platforms such as Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. Being able to leverage one of the more popular JavaScript frameworks is certainly a step in the right direction.