Here's a nice little Mozilla/Firefox tip:
Mozilla has a nice way to view files that are in both your memory and file cache. In the Address Bar, type - about:cache. This will take you to a page that allows you to view a summary of your browser cache and also will allow you to browse the files stored in the cache.
It's recently come to my attention that some of my work is has been getting some mention in various forms of press as of late. The last issue of the ColdFusion Developer's Journal (Volume: 05 Issue: 10) has the second part of a two part article which is based upon the DTS article I posted a while back on PengoWorks.com.
Also, much to my surprise I found mention of my qForms JSAPI in a couple of books while browsing the bookstore the other day. The following books mention me:
Title: Reality ColdFusion: Intranets and Content Management
Author(s): Ben Forta
ISBN: 0321124146
Publisher: Macromedia Press
Christian Cantrell recently blogged on the issue of server-side and client-side validation in entry "Validation - Client or Server-side?." While he doesn't mention qForms specifically in his writings, many people commented on the usefulness of qForms and how it makes implemented the validation a cinch. Anyway, it's always good to read others viewpoints on my projects—especially when some of the comments come from people I respect. :)
Well, Steve Nelson's said what I've been thinking for a long time: Macromedia should buy qForms. I really probably out to learn the Dreamweaver API so that I can build a qForms add-on for it. (PS - Thanks to Michael Brunt for passing on the link to me.)
Now, if I can only get my girlfriend to understand that I'm "wicked smart"... :)
Mozilla v1.5 (Alpha) was just announced. There's a couple of new features, but the biggest news to me was that they've had to delay the release of Firebird. According the official Mozilla Roadmap:
It's clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone. Instead, we expect Mozilla 1.5 to coincide with Mozilla Firebird 0.7. But we intend to implement the new application architecture in the next several milestones, till most of the community is won over to the new apps.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I got some more work done on the masking routines I'm going to use for qForms. I'm still trying to decide the best way to implement some of the functionality. I'll probably break everything out that uses keyboard event handling into it's own library.
Anyway, the API is coming along quite nicely. There are still a number of features that I would like to see included in the first release of v2, but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to implement them. The concept of "groups" is still one of the main one's I'm struggling with. I just can't decide on the best way to implement them. I'd like to try to introduce the concept without bloating the code, but I think there's going to be a good amount of code needed to do everything w/groups that I'd like to do. Anyway, I continue to play with it and I'm sure I'll figure something out I'm happy with.
Well, the modern day "browser" is no officially 10 years. The first version of Mosaic was released 10 years ago today. Mosaic was written by several college students at the University of Illinois. Prior to the release of Mosaic, "surfing the web" was text-based only. Mosaic brought many of the common day functions to web browsing, such as: back/forward buttons, search, image support and the home button. Anyway, whether they knew it at the time or not, this little program affected the life of millions—including myself. I don't know what I'd be doing today if I weren't designing web applications.
On April 22, 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a piece of computer code designed to get information from various public networks. Little did they know that their pet project, a humble application named Mosaic, would fundamentally change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had traded hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet.- CNET
ZDNet recently published an article covering what the terms "encryption", "hashing" and "obfuscation" mean. If you're familiar with these terms, don't bother reading the article—you won't learn anything you don't already know. However, if you uncertain what the terms mean or simply unfamiliar with them, it does a good job of defining the words and provides some good examples.