In which I partially defend Microsoft and further lament the state of tech “journalism”.
A very short open letter:
Dear interwebs:
Please stop mis-representing the results of benchmarks. Or, at a minimum, please stop blogging the results in snide language that shows your biases. It makes the scientific method sad.
Thank you.
Alex Russell
Today’s example of failure made manifest comes [...]
I’m not sure how long it was b0rked, but the online ShrinkSafe app is back up and working.
Dojo’s has as long a history as any chunk of JavaScript in wide use, and it’s easy to forget how long the road has been and how far the project has come. Will of the Lucid Desktop project has put together a code_swarm visualization of the project’s history to date. Lots of fun to see [...]
A relatively light-on-data article is up at Slashdot right now, and it casts aspersions both on the IBMers who contribute to Dojo and on the Foundation itself based on the Free Software party line that all software patents are inherently evil.
I won’t address the background point regarding software patents here. I’ll only to say that [...]
No less than the Times has chastised the Chrome team’s marketing efforts, noting unsubtly that for months now we’ve been burying the lead: Chrome’s killer feature isn’t that it’s got an awesome UI (it does) or that it supports new web features…no, the real story that we haven’t been telling well is that it’s wicked [...]
The ES working group is hard at work on “Harmony”, the goals of which are significantly more sane than previous attempts to build a new language from JavaScript. Namely, they’re being careful to be able to express things in new syntax based on old syntax. This is referred to as “de-sugaring”. Many new bits of [...]
Stefan K. has posted a fascinating run-down of mobile browser performance with regards to JavaScript toolkits. No big shock, but Dojo once again brings home the bacon. I’d love to see these tests re-run with TaskSpeed instead of SlickSpeed, but when you’re doing progressive enhancement it turns out that selector engine performance really matters. Dojo [...]
Congrats to the Zend Framework team on releasing ZF 1.8! This release updates the Dojo/Dijit integration and includes Dojo 1.3. Not only can you use the ZF view helpers to generate existing widgets, now you can use the view helpers to declare instances of your own components too.
If you haven’t tried out ZF, it really [...]
Shane O’Sullivan, recently minted as as Dojo committer, has updated his GreaseMonkey script for skipping welcome screens to use Acme instead of Sizzle. Short story: fewer browser crashes and better performance.
If you’re not using Dojo, now might be a good time to ask why your library isn’t using Acme too.
ZDNet has an article out discussing a study that shows that that Chrome’s (Open Source) auto-update system makes the browser more secure than the alternatives. Disclosure: Google co-authored the study. I work for Google, on Chrome. Caveat emptor.
Back when I did security for a living, I quickly noted a distinction between those who saw things [...]
The Uxebu guys show how to use Google Spreadsheets as a cross-domain data source. Clever.
The Google O3D team just launched and the news stories are already starting to trickle out.
Ok, so it’s shiny…but so what?
First, O3D embeds V8. This means that while you might be running your O3D code in a browser with a terrible JavaScript engine, or worse, an engine with terrible GC pauses, your O3D content isn’t [...]
Google Analytics is ubiquitous, not least of all because it’s better at what it does than most of the alternatives. Also, it doesn’t require any install or maintenance. And it’s free. What’s not to like?
Frankly, not much, but if I had to nit pick, I’d note that the worst part of Google Analytics is the [...]
Google Updater, aka “Omaha”, has gone Open Source!
This is the auto-update system that’s key to keeping Chrome secure by always ensuring that the version you’re running is the freshest it can be. It’s huge for the Omaha team to be out in the open, particularly given how many inaccurate articles have been penned about the [...]
Dojo 1.3 is here! (download site)
If you’re already using Dojo, this should be a no-brainer upgrade. It’s out-and-out better. As a quick example, dojo.create(”tagname”, { /*properties*/ }) is now the preferred way to build DOM nodes quickly. Its simple API will be natural to anyone who has used dojo.attr(). Even better, Pete’s exciting PlugD version [...]
