I’ve got to share this quote from Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, Inc. I don’t know if he said this exactly, but according to the YUI Blog:
Blank web pages are fast. Web pages become slow because you put stuff in them.
Enough said!
I just saw a great post over at Ajaxian. It details a new jQuery plugin to easily enable sorting on a table. The features look awesome - multiple column sorting being one of them! Definately worth checking out.
JavaScript/AJAX isn’t always the best tool for the job. Over the last 2 years, I’ve been the principal developer on the CRM project at work. For most of that time, it has primarily been a Javscript, Web-enabled application.
Recently, we have realised that we’ve hit the wall with what is possible with JavaScript and HTML (especially when the target platform is IE6+). We are now moving to the Java-based RCP (Rich Client Platform), which is part of the Eclipse framework.
I believe that JavaScript frameworks have a place, but I do not think it is within enterprise-critical applications. When the environment is controlled and scalability and performance is a factor, you should carefully consider your options before joining the AJAX bandwagon.
Well, I’ve been extremely busy building the next version of our internal CRM application. It’s built on top of Ext (primary used for utility classes) and our own “JCP” framework (Javascript Client Platform). I’ll be doing a few posts in the coming days/weeks about that, as I have got a few nuggets of wisdom to share about JScript development on IE.
And… I’ve got to upgrade my version of wordpress!
I have been using the Ext (formally yui-ext) JavaScript framework for some time now, and just recently they released a major new version. It is jam packed with goodness, including the best grid I have seen, tree, dialogs, layouts, forms, and more… If you are looking for a serious cross-browser user interface lib, then I strongly suggest you give these guys a go. Oh, and it’s FREE.
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:
Disadvantages:
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.
JSON is now an RFC standard (4627). This is great news, as I have been a major user of the format for quite some time now in my AJAX applications. (via Sleepyhead.)
Douglas Crockford should be congratulated for his continued work in this area.
CFjsmin v2.0 (beta) has been released. Specifically, this version adds support for compressing JavaScript strings.
Key features: