Den Odell

Could it be? Is it true?!

Both Microsoft and Nokia have lent support to John Resig’s open source JavaScript library, jQuery. MS will be writing their ASP.NET AJAX controls using the library (which is great, as I’ve had many problems trying to debug clashes between their JS code and mine in the past), and Nokia will be writing a bunch of their apps within the browser on their mobile phones (WebKit rendering engine), including Nokia Maps, which I’ve had the fortune of working on a particular version of recently.

For a while now, IBM and AOL have lent support to Dojo, which is a rather different beast to jQuery, in my opinion.

With the big players getting involved and adding back to these projects, credence to the ideal of cross-browser JavaScript and JS components that ‘just work’ is becoming ever greater.

jQuery is a great library, in my opinion, and the team that work on it are trying to push the browser for all it’s worth. On behalf of all the Web application developers out there, we salute you for your efforts, Resig & co.

I’ve been reading, as I am sure you have too (right?), about the ongoing competition that’s breaking out between rivals in the browser development world regarding JavaScript performance in their browsers.

First, WebKit announced SquirrelFish, their super-fast JS engine that kicked the pants of anything in the current browsers (as far as I am aware, this still hasn’t reached Safari). Then Mozilla fought back with TraceMonkey, using ever more complex programming and efficiency techniques to improve JS runtime performance, which will be in Firefox 3.1 but switched off by default as it’s still being tested. Then, to much fanfare, Google released their Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript engine which they claimed was the fastest out there (I beg to differ when it comes to DOM interaction, but certainly for hardcore code, it rocked).

Now, the WebKit team has announce SquirrelFish Extreme, which initial benchmarks show runs 36% faster than V8 and 55% faster than TraceMonkey (http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-extreme-has-landed.html ).

The future certainly looks bright (and speedy) for those of us building Web applications. Very exciting.

An interesting post on using SVG via the Dojo JS library to render custom fonts on your pages: http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/09/08/custom-fonts-with-dojoxgfx/

Limitations include: slow as hell on IE, and slow as hell when replacing more than about 5 headings (as with sIFR). Nice experiment though.

As you know, Google’s Chrome browser is built on top of WebKit, the same engine used in Apple’s Safari browser among others. Google made a big deal of their new V8 JavaScript engine they’d written for Chrome and it seems like this, and the graphics rendering library they use, are being checked back into WebKit for other manufacturers to use should they so wish. Yummy open source goodness.

So now WebKit has V8 AND SquirrelFish JavaScript engines, both super fast, available for browser developers to harness out the box with WebKit. I only hope we see Mozilla pooling their skills and flipping to use WebKit some time in the future for Firefox. They can still build the browser around the engine any way they like, it almost seems unnecessary to have two open source browser engines now. Controversial!

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/09/08/chrome-features-are-coming-to-webkit/

Virtual PC can be a very useful tool for testing websites in multiple versions if IE (the software ‘Multiple IEs’ does not render all things like the real McCoy, as we have discovered)… 

The updated VPC images from MS are available for download now, and they include:

• XP SP3 + IE6
• XP SP2 + IE7
• XP SP3 + IE8b2
• Vista + IE7

They expire in January, at which time MS will update them.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

Whether the figures stand the test of time or not, we shall see, but as of today/yesterday at least Google’s Chrome browser is responsible for 1% of global market share of the browsers out there. That obviously doesn’t sound like much, but remember it took Firefox some years to reach its current 22% market share. Though it seems like small numbers, it’s quite important.

Now if Google can just persuade corporate environments to drop IE6 as their main browser, it will be an even better day.