At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company’s future plans to open up almost everything.
Link: The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!
For those who are not familiar, FreshBooks is a great time tracking and invoicing tool for individuals and small business. As a FreshBooks customer I'm looking forward to digging into this new offering.
With the release of FreshBooks Report Cards, FreshBooks will provide an ongoing series of publicly accessible quarterly reports, detailing the financial performance of these workers through metrics like amount invoiced, average time to collect, amount invoiced per client, percentage of revenue from new clients, and percentage of revenue that is recurring.
Link: FreshBooks Provides Unique View into Small Business Finances – ReadWriteWeb
While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release:
Link: Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release now available
Jason Fried is something of a contrarian, his tiny, Chicago-based company 37signals has been a major force in the tech industry over the past few years. Sure, it doesn't have the market cap of a Google or a Sun Microsystem, but it also doesn't have the overhead, and a company like Sun would have gladly paid a few hundred million for the sort of reputation Fried's 37signals has developed from nothing.
Link: Jason Fried of 37Signals on Business, Focus, and Avoiding Interruption – O’Reilly Broadcast
1. The semantic barriers won’t be as important as the languages rush to steal good ideas from one and other.
2. Frameworks are becoming even more dominant.
3. Applications are becoming their own worlds.
4. Communities will be more important.
5. The Web and the cloud are the ultimate platform. 6. Better language technology will make a difference.
7. Emulation and cross-compilation will extend the life of dynamic code.
8. All of the embedding makes it simpler for programming to escape the command line and start appearing in Web applications themselves.
9. The rise of the amateurs may make much of dynamic programming irrelevant.
10. Adaptability for modern architectures is key.
Link: 10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting
Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers.
Link: Install FLIR – Typography Solution For The Web » DivitoDesign
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr’s Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queueing system to do the rest.
Strategy: Flickr – Do the Essential Work Up-front and Queue the Rest
Obfuscated TCP is a transport layer protocol that adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
Guido van Rossum, a Google App Engine developer, has released into open source the Rietveld Code Review Tool at http://codereview.appspot.com. This web application ties into a subversion repository to create a work flow for the review and commenting of newly submitted code.
This tool was born from an Google internal tool that Guido developed called Mondrian. Guido gave a Google TechTalk on the Mondrian tool called Mondrian Code Review On The Web (YouTube link). This TechTalk provides insight into how the work flow operates and how helpful a tool like this can be. Perhaps something to play with on your next project…
Resources
Overview of Rietveld Code Review Tool
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/rietveld.html
Rietveld Code Review Tool online Demo
http://codereview.appspot.com/
Documentation
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/w/list
Source code
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/checkout
Mondrian Code Review on the Web (Google TechTalk Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc
IBM developerWorks has a great article by Kristopher William Zyp on the tools and methods used to analyze Ajax application performance titled Ajax performance analysis. It provides a good overview of what affects an Ajax based application, the tools to probe these aspects and actions developers can take to help speed things up. Much of the information revolves around YSlow and Firebug and provides a great overview for developers who may be unfamiliar with nuances of client side development.
Resources
Ajax performance analysis
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-perform/
