Toluu : Ajaxonomy - The Study of Ajax and Other Interesting Web Technologies

Ajaxonomy - The Study of Ajax and Other Interesting Web Technologies

The Firebug 1.3 plug-in for Firefox 3.0.x has been released. The release features new tracing capability, used mostly for internal debugging but used to drive improvements in the Net panel as well. There are also numerous bug fixes. The full release notes are here.

The upcoming 1.4 release of Firebug will target Firefox 3.1.

Is SOA Dead?Yesterday

The Burton Group's Anne Thomas Manes wrote a provocative post yesterday declaring that SOA (as a term at least) is dead. It will, of course, be replaced by...(drum roll, please)...SERVICES! Hmm...isn't that what the "S" in SOA stands for? To quote Manes:

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA has instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations. In the beginning, the forecast for SOA was to reduce costs and increase agility on a large scale, but except in rare situations, SOA has not delivered those promised benefits.

But, take solace, consultants everywhere! For all is not lost...

SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

Ah, I knew there had to be a silver lining to that cloud (*sniff*).

Cheekiness aside, the reality is that many organizations haven't really had a clue as to what SOA really is or how to do it. They, led by all too eager vendors and the general vagueness of the term itself, naively equated "SOA" with tacking on web services to their existing applications or building an ESB like a "field of dreams"--which many did, and dutifully waited for the magic transformation to come. It never did, mostly because many organizations were already too mired in years

Merb to be Merged into Rails 3.0December 24 2008

Yesterday the Ruby on Rails team broke the news: the alternative Ruby web application framework, Merb, will be merged into Ruby on Rails 3.0. Merb, which was already closely patterned after Rails, brings performance, modularity, and better integration with alternative JavaScript and ORM frameworks to the table. The default Rails configuration will still be the "full stack" framework, which uses ActiveRecord and Prototype, but there will also be a "Rails Core" with the ability to opt into specific other (e.g. JavaScript or ORM) frameworks as desired.

You can read the announcements by DHH here and Yahuda Katz here.

Ajax for the Lazy: AjaxifyDecember 22 2008

From the "good to know" deptartment: a new jQuery plugin for converting existing links on a page to AJAX load and submit requests is available: Ajaxify.

Some examples:

//The easiest way: binds "click" event to existing "href" attribute //and loads it into the portion of the page specified by the "target" //attribute $("#some_id").ajaxify(); //With options $('#some_id').ajaxify({ link:'example.php?action=options&ajax=true', target: '#container', loading_img:'images/orange_loading.gif', title:'Setting up options', method:'POST' });

The Ajaxify plug-in also supports partial loads and forms. A demo page is available here.

jQuery 1.3 Beta 1December 22 2008

The first beta release of jQuery 1.3 is out.

Changes since 1.2.x:

New CSS selector engine (Sizzle)
Rewrite of DOM manipulation
Rewrite of namespaced event handling
Rewrite of .offset()
And more...

See earlier coverage here for more details.

Get jQuery 1.3 beta 1 here.