Darryl Lyons’ Blog

The sysadmin type people at my work don’t want to move to IE7 probably until there is an SP1 release. While I understand their reluctance, it is frustrating developing for IE6 knowing that a better corporate SOE alternative exists! A lot of the leak issues we experience now will be minimised, and the speed improvements alone are a compelling reason to upgrade.

I hope Microsoft release a SP1 release soon.. What if they never do, and we have to wait until IE8!?

However, there are other issues.. Other internal/external web applications, that the organisation relies upon, will need to work with the new version, and I don’t think we will upgrade until that can be guaranteed.

Ever thought about using Microsoft’s HTML Application (HTA) technology? If you are developing AJAX applications for internal customers and have standardized on Internet Explorer, then I would highly recommend this route.

Basically, a HTA only uses the Internet Explorer rendering engine, so you don’t get any of the browser add-ons such as the toolbar, status bar, and address bar. The back button is not available. You get a blank canvas on which to work.

The other benefits include:

• Complete access to local machine
• Smaller memory footprint
• A bit quicker than using the browser
• No back button
• No context menu

Disadvantages:

• Only runs on Windows machines
• Uses IE rendering engine
• User is prompted to RUN the application (because of security)

One of the less obvious benefits is that a HTA pretty much eliminates some of the closure memory leak problems with IE. Basically, whenever you destroy DOM elements (and leave/refresh a page), expando properties that reference JavaScript objects are not cleaned up. This in turn means that memory allocated to the DOM element is not freed.

When you close a HTA (there is no concept of refreshing the page other than F5), you destroy the entire process – hence the memory leaks are not an issue. If you create and destroy DOM elements within the application however, then you will still have to handle these appropriately.

Anyone else play with HTAs?

At last, the project I have been working on for the last 3 to 4 months has come to a close (just in time for Christmas). I’ve been working on version 2 of our internal AJAX CRM application, and it went into production last month.

I did the release out of hours, so it would disrupt the least amount of people. Around 2 ½ hours later it was on the production servers with minimal fuss. The most rewarding thing for me after so much work is hearing praise from users. A few even emailed the project sponsors stating how much they loved the upgrade. I haven’t heard any negative comments as of yet (you can’t please everyone)…

A lot of my previous posts have been based on lessons learned during v1.0.0 development, and my up and coming posts will no doubt contain similar content.

I’m busily managing the development of the 2.1 release…

I’ve recently discovered the great work by Jack Slocum in his Yahoo Extensions library. Basically, he has taken the YAHOO User Interface library (YUI) and extended it to the point of creating his own very useful framework.

If you want a robust, cross-browser user interface JavaScript library, I urge you to check out this guy’s work. So far I have been very impressed, and am looking for ways to incorporate his work into my own development.