The Browser War is flaring up once again with the release of Google Chrome. Google Chrome is a new browser based on many freely available open source components such as WebKit and Firefox. Chrome is bare bones, chromeless, browser with very little UI fluff and decoration. It is interesting to note that the UI for the Google browser took a note from the companies colorful logo, the Chrome UI is very cartoon-like with a blue pastel color scheme.

Many of the features that are high lighted in Chrome are not necessarily revolutionary, instead I would say that the Google browser is retro-evolutionary. Chrome basically reduced the browser to the location bar, tabs, and content page.

The most touted features in Chrome are its crash control, incognito mode, and safe browsing. Chrome runs each web page on its own process so that if one page fails only that page is effected. Incognito mode is like Safari’s Private Browsing, aka Porn Mode, it allows you to surf the web without caching cookies and history of the sites you visit on your local computer. It’s safe browsing feature will help you to identify web sites with malicious code or applications. Many of these features are not entirely novel, so why would Google go to the efforts of creating a new browser?

What I think is novel is that Google decided to release yet another browser. The browser space is already crowded with Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and Flock to name just a few. It is clear that Google will align Chrome with its properties, search, applications, development tools, and user generated content sites. Seeing Google take this approach I wonder if other companies follow suit and release internet browsers that compliment their business. Can you imagine a custom browser from Adobe, Mcaffee, Oracle, Amazon, or EBay?

Via Noise to Signal

Technorati Tags: google, chrome, firefox, ie, browser, adobe, oracle

Hpricot is a HTML parser for the Ruby programming language. With Hpricot you can scan and scape a HTML document. To illustrate how to use Hpricot i’ll write a list the code of a short script I recently wrote. The script grabs all the links for the past week from A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

The general structure of the HTML used by the web page that I will be scraping is something like the following.

One thing to note about the HTML produced by the site we will scape is that the date is optional in the post. The date is only displayed once for a day, so some posts don’t have a given date. Also, there are several other types of posts such as quotes, images, etc. We are only interested in posts with links. Again, the Ruby/Hpricot script will only gather the links for the past week.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyist, hpricot, html, scape

Prism is a new project from Mozilla Labs that essentially dresses up a web applications as desktop applications. Prism can create desktop, start menu, and quick launch desktop shortcuts for any given URL. The shortcuts launch the web application in a undecorated application window running Firefox underneath.

Prism works well for web applications, where all the links point to the domain where the application is running from. If you there are links to other domains, Prism will open those links in FireFox instead of the Prim application window. Other than launching the web application in a undecorated application window, I don’t see how different this is from just creating a internet shortcut. The web application is not downloaded, you still need internet access, and you are still limited by the browser limitations for it to really feel like a desktop application.

I think some great opportunities will emerge if you can mashup Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, and some great JavaScript libraries like YUI!, jQuery, or Ext JS. This is definitely a technology to watch.

Technorati Tags: firefox, mozilla, prism, gears, web, webdesign

iPhone Development

The iPhone Dev Camp started on Saturday by a nice presentation by Chritopher Allen, a MacHack veteran, regarding what is known about the iPhone from a web developer’s perspective. What is known is that the iPhone uses web standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF and Quicktime). Web 2.0 best practices apply for the iPhone, such as the proper use and sepration of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Christopher recommends avoiding the use of Flash, SVG, Java applets, embedded video, custom x.509 certificates, and framesets. Christopher also states the the finger is not a mouse and you need to design accordingly with large enough buttons and links with plenty of space between each other.
Fingers can do more than the traditional point and drag cursor such as double tap, touch and hold, one or two finger drag, flick, and pinch.

It might come as a surprise but many of JavaScript events don’t work, such as onscroll, onkeydown, onkeypress, onmousemove, etc. Some web development recommendations for the iPhone are to use columns and small blocks in the layout, such as floating divs. You should also use the tel: and mailto: protocols in links. You can also integrate with Google Maps simply by adding your location search to maps.google.com/maps? URL.

The current activity on the the iPhoneWebDev Google Groups seems to be focused around iPhone specific development libraries, implementing the infamous back button, debugging JS, optimizing application for low bandwidth, and hacking the viewport. There is also a series of open questions such as, what level of support is there for the canvas tag? What level of persistent storage is available, cookies? The right questions will lead to the right answers. I have also published a great list of available iPhone development resources.

Most of time at the iPhone Dev Camp was spent developing a collaborating for the hack-a-thon. This was a working camp focused on developing some really cool applications on the iPhone.
Read more »

Here is a list of links to the best available iPhone development resources such as simulators, development plugins, wikis, and other JavaScript/HTML/Safari documentation.

• iPhoney - A free iPhone web simulator for designers.
• iPhone Interface in JavaScript - A JavaScript based iPhone simulator.
• iPhone Simulator - Yet another JavaScript-based iPhone simulator.
• Morfik Builds First iPhone Development Tool - Development tool for iPhone.
• Aptana IDE: iPhone Development Plugin - Aptana iPhone development plugin for Eclipse.
• Firebug for iPhone - “Trying to debug web pages on my iPhone transported me back to a dark place I hadn’t been in some time: The Land of alert() Debugging!”
• iPhone Dev Wiki - iPhone development wiki.
• Apple iPhone development secrets revealed - Some development tips and advice.
• iPhone Javascript and spec benchmark - Some iPhone benchmarks.
• iPhone Web Development Tips - Tips available from Ajaxian.
• iPhone Dev Camp - iPhone devcamp in San Francisco.
• iPhone Web Dev - iPhone development Google group.
• Web Develpoment for iPhone - Official Apple Developer Connection documentation.
• JavaScript Coding Guidelines for Mac OS X - JavaScript basics and best practices.
• Introduction to the Document Object Model - DOM basics.

Bonus Resource

• IPhoneWebDev - Some nice web examples and tips for the iPhone.

Technorati Tags: iphone, development, webdev, apple, safari, javascript, iphonewebdev, iphonedev, iphonedevcamp

Here are all my notes taken at CommunityOne and JavaOne 2007. I was in San Francisco for 5 days and attended over 40 technical and birds of a feather sessions and managed to put together this 30 page document. For you download pleasure you can find a PDF version of all my conference notes.

CommunityOne 2007: Monday
Welcome to CommunityOne 2007
Getting Started and what’s New in GlassFish v2
Lunch with the Java Posse
Ajax Applications Made Easy with jMaki and Scripting
Swing GUI Building with Matisse: Chapter II
JRuby: Understanding the Fuss
Up the Stack
G2One

JavaOne 2007: Tuesday
Tuesday General Session
JRuby on Rails - Agility for the Enterprise
Evolutionary Java - General Session
Java Puzzlers
Using jMaki in a Visual Development Environment
Java Persistence API - Best Practices and Tips
Developing a Real-World Web Application with NetBeans 5.5 Visual Web Pack
Grails, Sails, and Trails - Rails Through a Coffee Filter
Rapid Seam Application Development with the NetBeans IDE

JavaOne 2007: Wednesday
Wednesday General Session
Swing Vector Graphics
Effective Java Reloaded - This Time It’s for Real
Building JavaServer Faces Applications with Spring and Hibernate
Extreme GUI Makeover 2007
Anatomy of an Eclipse RCP Application
Tricks and Tips with NIO
Dive into the GlassFish Aquarium
Seamless Web Browser Integration
Putting a Swing Front End on a Web Application

JavaOne 2007: Thursday
Thursday General Session
Being Productive with Swing
Technical Overview of GlassFish v2
JavaScript FX
Why Spaghetti is Not Tasty
Beans Binding
Write a 3D Game in Java
Web 3.0 - This is the Semantic Web
The Java 3D API and Java Binding for OpenGL
Glossitope - An Open-Source Java-based Widget Container

JavaOne 2007: Friday
Friday General Session
Bringing Life to Swing Desktop Applications
Ajax and JavaServer Faces Tooling in Eclipse
Bytecode Manipulation Techniques for Dynamic Applications for the JVM
Filthy-Rich Clients - Talk Dirty to Me
Writing Games with Project Darkstar

Technorati Tags: javaone, javaone2007, glassfish, darkstar, netbeans, eclipse, rcp, jmaki, jsf, jfx, javafx script