All the hype and rumors surrounding Microsoft Silverlight in last few days has now come to an end. Microsoft announced that SilverLight 1.1 will be now named SilverLight 2.0. The second installment of SilverLight (Microsoft’s-damn-freaking-way-to-monopolize-the-market) will support C# and Visual Basic of the .NET Framework which is a big plus. That’s a big move from Microsoft to beat down Adobe Flash.
Silverlight 2.0 is still in the development process and will take time to be out in public but the alpha release is out. Many firms and businesses are adopting Silverlight (instead of Flash) for their web applications due . But Flash still dominates the World-Wide-Web with a penetration over 93% for Flash Player 9 and over 99% for previous versions.
The battle between Adobe and Microsoft is still going and Microsoft is catching Adobe fast. If Adobe doesn’t do something fast they could lose this war. Oh god, I can feel the tension between Bruce Chizen and Steve… not that Steve, I meant Steve Ballmer. I don’t expect any gracefulness from anyone of them to the other, but I expect them to speed up the RIA (Rich Internet Application) development process and start working on getting rid of bugs been out there for years!
A new logo for Adobe AIR has been announced. Mike Chambers posted the new logo on his blog as he says:
Adobe AIR is built on top of three core web technologies (HTML, Flash and PDF), and we wanted the logo to represent this. Thus, each corner of the logo represents one of these core technologies.
I posted less than hour ago about an article to create PDF documents using Java. Now I’m gonna give ya a new post on how to create PDF documents using PHP 5. You only need to install PDFlib library to use its APIs to create PDF file.
After being in beta like forever, Dojo 1.0 is out in full release. Dojo is one of the famous JavaSript libraries out there. It is an open source project and has been developed by many talented programmers. Ajax lovers will love this library for all the functionality it provides for developers and how easy life can be when developing with JavaScript.
Here are some features of Dojo 1.0:
Accessibility including keyboard navigation, low vision support, and ARIA markup for assistive technologies
High performance grid widget supporting 100,000+ rows of data
Browser-native 2-D and 3-D charting
A full library of easy-to-use, attractive UI controls
Universal data access for simple and fast data-driven widget development
Internationalization with localizations provided for 13 major languages
CSS-driven themes to make customization and extension simple
Dojo Offline, based on Google Gears, which makes offline applications easy to build
Support for the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits
Native 2-D and 3-D vector graphics drawing
Access to many more widgets and extensions through the Dojo package system
Wonderful news for all Flex 2 students out there! Adobe Flex 2 is going to be free for education purpose. A detail of this news is available at Yahoo Finance.
Paging navigation system might be new concept for some developers. Not many websites out there really uses that method… through thousands of website I browsed, I have only seen that method being used maybe twice. One of those websites is DZone.com.
Paging navigation is good on some situations. Like DZone.com, it is good on browsing a long list of data and maybe for viewing topics and articles but not always. If the page is so long and/or has lots of multimedia components it could slow front-end machines because it will consume resources. An article by Pete Forde talks about the paging system and how to implement it.
Making a cross browser web page is a developer’s dream. Everybody likes to make a website that works for every visitor’s machine. For big companies it is very vital to make a website that satisfies every client. If a client can’t browse a company website why should he deal with that company?!
There are many tools out there can help every programmer to create a cross browser web application. This article written by Justin shows some of these tools.
Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it’s much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework.
