AJAX Magazine

Qooxdoo have just released version 0.8, one of the most interesting open-source, enterprise-level AJAX/RIA frameworks. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build impressive cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed.

It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved substantially.

Improve Online Sales by Integrating Single Page Checkout, Custom Shipping Zones and Other Store Management Features Such as Support for iPhone Order Processing

SYDNEY, Australia -- Interspire, the global leader in e-commerce, content management and email marketing software, today announced availability of Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5. The newest version of the Interspire private label e-commerce software is the perfect option for businesses searching for a simple way to build and manage an online store with the intrinsic ability to increase conversion rates.

While there are many ecommerce software options, the problem is that they are difficult to use and are often hard to customize without help from a web designer. Retailers find that few programs offer key functionality for running an online business. For example, they do not integrate with marketing tools or provide business intelligence so that business owners can improve their offering.

"A variety of industry analysts in the ecommerce space advocate improving personalization, offering secure buying options and providing quick transactions to turn visitors into customers," said Eddie Machaalani, CEO and co-founder of Interspire. "Etailers need intuitive products that can impact conversion rates. Interspire products wrap all the features and options needed into one package so our customers can get up and running quickly and sell more."

Thomas Hansen the creator of Gaia Ajax Widgets have recently announced that he is no longer with Gaiaware and already started a new ASP.NET Ajax library Ra-Ajax and a new company Ra Software AS. Thomas have quit Gaiaware due to disagreeing on the future of the company with the others, you can read his very long blog post on the current situation.

Ra-Ajax his new Ajax library is under LGPL 3 license is an ultra lightweight, slick and small Ajax library for ASP.NET and Mono which tries to completely abstract away JavaScript from the developer. It's true that the library is new, but its size zip-compressed already exceed the 7Mo ! The website provide some good samples including Event system, Effects, Dynamic Controls, Button, Checkbox, DropDownList, Image, Labels, Panel, TextBox, Accordion, Calendar, InPlaceEdit, RichEdit, Timer ... and more. More information and download at http://ra-ajax.org/.

AWC Blackjack is a multi-player blackjack game under development but currently available for testers to give feedback and help improving the game. The back-end game server is entirely written in PHP, and the front-end is pure AJAX. Only about 33K to download at the moment (excluding graphics).

The game doesn't use any JavaScript framework so I think there is a lot to do in addition to some graphic design work. But the demo plays great for blackjack fans. Tested with FF 1.5 and later on winxp, FF2 on Linux and IE6,7 winxp.

4D have recently released a new version of their Ajax Framework, included in this new release a major enhancement with HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe Air support, In addition to support codeless generation of an Ajax client for the iPhone. Below the press release :

Major release features the world's first Flex-to-Database direct connectivity, iPhone 2.0, HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe AIR Support

July 24, 2008 - SAN JOSE, CA - 4D, Inc., maker of an integrated software platform that simplifies the process of developing and deploying business applications, announced today the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D Ajax Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to easily harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

"With the advent of technologies like Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) both Flex-powered and Ajax-driven, the iPhone, Adobe AIR, HTML 5, and Google Gears, web applications are making their way to more mobile devices, desktops and, yes, browsers than ever before,"said Laurent Ribardière, President and founder of 4D.

4D for Flex provides the world's first Flex-to-database direct connectivity. All other Flex-to-database solutions require complicated, overweight middleware solutions. 4D for Flex offers a simple, integrated Flex-to-SQL database direct connection. With zero overhead, 4D for Flex not only provides a revolutionarily simple, integrated architecture, but also high-performance connectivity to 4D Server v11 SQL and other industry standard SQL databases.

Packt publishing have recently released a new and interesting JavaScript book that teaches users how to create scalable and reusable JavaScript applications and libraries using the concepts of object-oriented programming. Written by Yahoo! Web developer Stoyan Stefanov, Beginning Object-Oriented JavaScript will teach users to solve web development problems using smart JavaScript. Ajax Magazine readers can download the sample chapter (PDF 872Ko) to have an idea on what the book is all about.

For years, JavaScript has been a handy hacker's tool for adding interactive elements to web pages, now it can be used to build large libraries, multi-tier application architectures, and advanced logic. With these new applications of JavaScript, you need a new way to learn and write it. This book treats JavaScript as a serious object-oriented language. It shows how to build robust, maintainable, and powerful JavaScript libraries, applications, and classes as well as cover many of the recent JavaScript innovations such as AJAX, JSON, and interesting design and coding patterns.

Catalyst Resources released a "green audit" of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaborative workspace project that allows distributed business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. The AJAX Rich Internet Application (RIA) enabled Catalyst Resources to reduce its carbon impact footprint by 21,000 lbs of CO2 per month, while simultaneously reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%.

Since 2002 Catalyst Resources has evolved and enhanced their secure online collaboration, project management and document sharing solution for use by remote employees and select clients. Recently Catalyst began to track how the web collaboration solution impacted the company's greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the need for air travel and local commuting.

"When we ran the analysis, we were pleased with by the significant reduction in our own carbon footprint." said Paul Giurata, Managing Partner of Catalyst Resources. "The question then became how we could broaden the green impact, by expanding the solution from an internal resource, into a customizable team space to be used by our entire client base."

Ruben Daniels have written two interesting articles about outlining new functionality of Javeline PlatForm. With the release of version 0.98.2, PlatForm has enhanced backbutton support. In combination with state objects it implements backbutton support by encoding all state data in the hash.

The second article on Docking Windows in the browser - the kind of new feature that you won't see anywhere else. It allows you to create UI's similar to Aptana or Visual Studio, with windows that can be docked, undocked etc.

For more gaming fun with JavaScript, BeSlimed is a very interesting Mootools implementation of BeJewelled game - my favorite game on my mobile ! Now you can enjoy it on browser too.

John have just announced jQuery 1.2.6, a bugfixes releases with major improvements and many new features. Key performance improvements include 103% Faster Event Handling, 13% faster CSS selectors, 21% faster .offset() and 25% faster .css(). New features and major changes in jQuery 1.2.6 :

More information and download from jQuery.com

OpenAjax Alliance has assembled a set of white papers as a guide to help Web developers and IT managers understand and evaluate Ajax, define a successful Ajax strategy, and become familiar the important role OpenAjax plays in the development of the Ajax market. The great news for the mobile web application industry is the new whitepaper to create more advance and rich applications for mobile devices. The white paper discusses Ajax-based solutions for mobile devices and outlines key design considerations. It is intended for those with prior experience with mobile application development or desktop Ajax techniques.

You can find the Introduction to Mobile Ajax for Developers in addition to others OpenAjax whitepapers at openajax.org

DHTMLX have just announced the latest update of its dhtmlxSuite, a professional Ajax components toolkit for web UI. The major updates concern Grid and Treegrid components and include a large number of new features and improvements, including the ability to load data from JSON and JS-array, smart rendering and paging support for hierarchical data grids. Also a new component, dhtmlxSlider, is introduced. Below the press release :

Saint Petersburg, Russia, May 19, 2008 - In the light of the latest update of its Ajax UI toolkit, DHTMLX have released the newest version 1.6 of its dhtmlxGrid component, a feature-rich Ajax data grid for web applications. Being the main "player" in DHTMLX components library, dhtmlxGrid incorporates all the advanced functionality required for building rich tabular interfaces, as well as fast and reliable performance and polished design.

With this release dhtmlxGrid, which is a pure client-side JavaScript component, introduces more flexibility for client-server communication capabilities providing the ability to load data from JSON and JS-array. So, now developers can chose which data format to use: XML, JSON, CSV, JS-array or simple HTML. Besides, since this update the grid supports custom XML format allowing developers to define custom XML attributes.

Live Forms Software Unleashes the Power of Web 2.0 Applications with Built-In Business Capabilities

BRANFORD, Conn. - May 12, 2008 - frevvo, empowering businesses to create rich, dynamic Internet applications, today announced Live Forms™ software which enables users and developers to easily create rich AJAX forms with built-in business capabilities. Live Forms provides a complete Web-based design experience that can be quickly embedded into any application and is ideal for Enterprise Social Software companies, BPM/SOA vendors, Web hosting providers and solution providers.

Businesses are realizing the compelling attraction of not just moving old systems to the Web, but providing users with a collaborative, point-and-click design and run-time experience for putting together applications from simple, short-lived applications created by power users to meet immediate business needs to larger applications created by IT developers that work with SOA deployments. This is accelerating the trend towards Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Social Software. However, the vast majority of business processes depend on forms. The need for rich, user-friendly tools to create business-savvy forms is a key aspect of unleashing the power of Web 2.0 within the enterprise.

Nitobi have just released Q2 version of its Complete UI solution for Ajax developers. Highlighted in this release the full Safari 3 support, in addition to a new hierarchical grid component and a variety of new themes. Below some of the new features :

Nitobi Complete UI is available for J2EE, ASP.NET, PHP, Classic ASP, or Coldfusion MX. For a limited time, Complete UI is on sale for 15% off the regular price. You can read the complete press release here http://www.nitobi.com/news/?a=58.

Last week we announced in exclusivity the new features of the Ajax RAD tool Morfik2. This week everyone can download the new version 2.0.0.63 of both M2 WebOS and Express Edition and get a look inside one of the very advanced Ajax tools. Robert Scoble had an interesting interview with Aram Mirkazemi, the CEO of Morfik, during the Web 2.0 Expo; you can watch the video here. You can download a 30-Day trial from morfik.com.