Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open source development, today announced the launch of a new foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine. The Mozilla Foundation will continue and expand on the efforts of mozilla.org, the group managing the daily operations of the Mozilla project since its inception.
Ok, AOL announced today that their breaking off Mozilla into it's own foundation called The Mozilla Foundation. They're providing $2 million in funding over the next 2 years, but that's not really that much money (but should last them get them through 2 years if they're budget conscious.) As Robi's often stated, open source really needs financial backing in order for projects to prosper—with AOL backing out financially, will anyone else step in? If not, is this the beginning of the end for Mozilla? With Microsoft claiming their discontinuing Internet Explorer as a standalone product and this news, there hasn't been much good news in the browser market over the past 2 months.
Mozilla's a pretty strong product right now—at least it's getting better and better with each release—so I'm sure if things are handled correctly over the next 2 years it won't go away. I still am complexed on why AOL never tried to leverage this product. I always assumed they were putting money in this project to use it as the basis for their AOL Software, but that obviously isn't the direction they chose to go with it. I'm really curious as to why they never leverage Mozilla into their software.
It always amazes me how much cool stuff has come from Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) branch. Graphical user interfaces (i.e. Windows and the Mac both use GUIs), the mouse, Ethernet, e-mail, WYSIWYG editors—all of these and more came from the minds of employees at PARC. Xerox really failed in the early 70s by not jumping on these experiments. However, that didn't stop people like Steve Jobs—who based many of the Apple features on things he saw during a trip to PARC—from capitalizing on the things the creative minds at PARC were creating.
Something the guys at PARC have been working on for a while now is DataGlyphs(r). I first remember reading about this probably a few years ago and at the time I didn't really give it much thought (other than to say: "Hey, that's cool.") I was watching TechTV last night and they brought on a researcher from PARC. He gave a demo on using a normal scanner with some custom built software that relied on DataGlyphs to read in the positions of chess pieces on the board. While this in itself wasn't all that practical of a use, DataGlyphs themselves are.
Essentially DataGlyphs give you the ability to embed binary data into a print-ready material that in unobtrusive to the human eye. It essentially is a replacement for the barcode system we currently use. To represent data, it uses a series of backward and forward slashes that represent ones and zeros.
Reasoning recently did a review of Apache's code and found that the defects per thousand lines of code were on par with commercial products in the same stage of development. Although the number of defects were slightly higher (by .02 per thousand lines of code,) Reasoning determined that the end result may turn out to be a better product due to the nature of open source projects—implying that bugs found are more likely to be addressed quickly by the public, since anyone has the ability to track down and repair the bugs.
"The open-source code seems to start at the same defect rate for early commercial code as well," Jeff Klagenberg, director of project management, said in an interview. "Over time, it can gain higher levels of quality. That appears to be because of the natural inspection process inherent in open source."
I hate to see blanket statements like this. I do think when an open source project has financial backing by a large company, that this probably holds true, but let's face it, there's only so much energy someone will put into a open source project before needing some kind of monetary return.
Today on CF-Talk, Scott Wilhelm posted a link to a good link checker called Xenu's Link Sleuth. The price is right on the program—it's free—and from the brief playing around I did with the software, it seems to do a really good job of spidering dynamic web sites. So, if you looking for a good link checker/validator, check it out.
I posted a new article to PengoWorks.com today that shows a technique for running multiple onload events without altering your base source code. Here's a quote:
One of the most common things I run into while developing sites dependant on JavaScript is the need to have multiple operations run during <body>'s onload event. I think this is a problem most developers run into, since it's very common to develop a set of "shared border" templates that render the shell of your site and the body of your document is included via a server-side command.
Often you have the need to invoke some JavaScript during the onload event of every page. This might be to render a DHTML-based menu, or simply to initial some information about the page, regardless, you need this information to run on every page.
However, you often run into the case were you need to run some addition commands based upon the page that's being inserted. Most often this happens when I'm developing a page that has a form on it. There are a lot of ways to tackle this problem, but the tip I'm going to share with you is the one that I've found over the years to be the best solution. For a lack of a better term, I'll call this the "Auto-init()" method.
If you have any comments about the article, please post a comment!
IBM's posted an article about sharing sessions between CFMX and J2EE components. It's obviously geared towards WebSphere, but the general concepts should carry over to other Java applications/classes.
Here's a good article with the author of Designing With Web Standards. I haven't read the book, but the article's worth reading—even though it is fairly long. The author discuss a lot of good points about browsers and developing for the large array of browsers out there.
Well I always forget this, so I figure I'd blog this so I don't spend 30 minutes messing around with the server trying to figure out what I need to get a servlet to execute on a virtual server in IIS5.
In order to get a servlet to run, you need to define your servet in the web.xml (which is in the directory CFusionMX\wwwroot\WEB-INF\.) A typical servlet defintion will look like this:
I recently blogged an entry about Microsoft phasing out the standalone version of Internet Explorer. Well, it now appears now that Microsoft is rapidly trying to recant that statement. That doesn't surprise me at all and I even alluded to the fact that they'd probably backpedal away from this announcement in my blog.
"We don't know what's happening," said the [Microsoft] representative. "There are a lot of different options, and it's too early to talk about any of them...Nothing has been decided yet."
Anyway, I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear about the issue.
Back in December of 2002, Mark Kruger posted a solution to using SSL over CFHTTP in CFMX when the remote server isn't using a trusted certificate. Since a private certificate is just as secure as a trusted certificate (in terms of encryption,) many corporation may end up using private certificates for some web services. So, if you're having recieving errors trying to connect to a remote server over SSL in CFMX, make sure to read Mark's blog entry.
Macromedia has publically announced latest release of ColdFusion MX, code-named "Red Sky". Make sure to check out the presentation on their take on what's new. This will be a free update for CFMX users. Here's a quick overview:
Performance/Stability:
Fixes:
Microsoft just made an interesting announcement in regards to Internet Explorer. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to drop the standalone version of Internet Explorer.
I found this quote quite ludicrous:
While IE does conform to most of the W3C's specs, there are still a number of areas where it needs improvement and updating—which don't have anything to do w/the underlying OS."Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I've got to admit, IE has been my preferred browser over the past 5-6 years or so—basically since IE3 was released. Over the past few years I've felt IE has the best browser on the market, but Gecko's made very good ground over the past year or so. I think the latest Gecko-based browser is a great product and with this announcement, I'm sure I'll find myself using it more and more. I'll probably stick with using Mozilla over NS, just because I find it's a little less bloated. Anyway, if MS sticks to this decision, I think it's probably the death of IE.
Claus Wahlers has just released a public beta of his "Deng" browser. The "Deng" browser is a Flash MX-based browser. Here's a quote about what it is from Claus' website:
If you are on a machine with Windows OS, you can now download an early beta version of The DENG Browser! The DENG Browser basically is the DENG Modular XBrowser Flash MX Component wrapped into a Screenweaver C++ Shell. The final release version is going to support CSS2, CSS3 Namespaces, SVG Mobile Profile, XHTML Tiny, XForms, XFrames and much more. All of these technologies are already ready to use in this Beta (with limited functionality yet though.. Also note that this is not supposed to replace your Mozilla or IE6). The Browser also comes together with a set of sample XHTML, SVG and XForms documents.