Entries from March 2008 ↓

Adobe has released an alpha version of their AIR runtime for Linux. This is great news for those of us waiting for true cross-platform availability before giving it a whirl. Hopefully the alpha will go well and we’ll have a full-featured, supported version soon.

via ReadWriteWeb.

Version 1.1 of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit has been released. The team not only fixed over 800 bugs but added many new features as well. For more information, check out the release notes.

Eric Meyer posted a dose of cautious skepticism on his blog today in response to all of the Acid3 test passing news going around the last few days. He has some valid points - The Acid3 test isn’t exactly a realistic representation of what developers do in the real world. However, I tend to think that something is better than nothing and at least browser vendors have something to aim at. Hopefully some of these criticisms will be taken to heart for a more comprehensive, real-world, reference test for browsers in the future.

Both Opera and WebKit have passed the Acid3 browser test. What is Acid3? It is a test page you can run that scores the browsers ability to render, pixel for pixel, a reference page. Acid3 not only tests CSS positioning and features, but also tests a browsers ability to manipulate and script DOM elements. Now if we could just get Firefox and Internet Explorer to pass, web developers would have a huge toolkit that would be cross-browser compatible without needing special hacks for specific browsers.

Eric Miraglia posts on the YUI Blog today about the recent exploits of Douglas Crockford. A synopsis of Mr. Crockford’s keynote from the AjaxWorld East 2008 Conference is available along with the slides from his talk. Most of his complaints about the current state of the web revolve around the insecurities inherent in web browsers and JavaScript.

The post also mentions an interview with Douglas Crockford, Alex Russell, and Joseph Smarr on Microsoft’s Channel 9.

Apache Commons Lang version 2.4 has been released. Lots of new methods were introduced, including 17 new methods for the StringUtils class, and some new formatting classes. Check out the release notes for more information.

Max Pool at CodeSqueeze has an interesting article on the decision between comfort and confidence. The article talks about how most teams will develop software not using the best tools for the job, but rather the tools they are comfortable with. It ends with some sage advice, telling you to get outside of your comfort zone occasionally and learn something new (say, maybe, a new programming language?).

RegDeveloper has the first in a five-part series from Scott Bain’s new book “Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development” up on their site today. In it, Scott goes over some basic qualities found in well-written maintainable code. I’ll be looking forward to reading the rest of the excerpts and eventually the book.

The Yahoo! developer network blog has posted slides from a talk Stoyan Stefanov made at the PHP Quebec Conference. In the talk there are twenty tips for maximizing the performance of your web pages. These tips are in addition to the regular ones you can get from YSlow.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has an excellent article this morning entitled “The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault“. This is particularly hilarious to me since I have seen this in action many times… Hibernate seems to be a recurring target of this anti-pattern. I’ve seen engineers on multiple occasions swear that something is wrong with Hibernate or that there is a bug in Hibernate and then propose to rip out the persistence layer all together and replace it with some home-grown JDBC interface. Tempers flare for a day or so and then finally somebody reads the docs and figures out the quirk in our code that caused the problems.  Mr. Atwood is doling out sound advice here and this is a good article to keep on hand for the next time you hear one of your peers suggest writing your own, less buggy, persistence layer.