O’Reilly: Inside RIA

A couple months ago I wrote an article on how to use Dojo to create a rich UI for websites. One of the key points of the article was how to support all users -- those with JavaScript enabled and those without. The purpose of this was to enable basic browsers like search engine spiders to go through your site without JavaScript, while enabling the rich interface for your regular users.

We applied two simple criteria to identify the 50 most usable RIAs: Number 1: Does it adhere to the 10 basic usability principles? Number 2:Is it really rich? Developing a product with Ajax, Flex, or Silverlight doesn't inherently make it rich. A usable RIA will embody these six principles: Make it Direct, Keep it Lightweight, Stay in the Page, Provide an Invitation, Use Transitions, React Immediately.

The Scalable Vector Graphics technology, SVG in short, seems to be experiencing nowadays its second (or third?) birth on the web. The browser vendors are investing heavily into lifting up what they initially prototyped long time before. This is true of Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but there is no clear indication on the plans to supporting SVG from the major browser vendor - Microsoft. True, Microsoft has recently made a vague statement on its commitment to support the standards and the thrilling web-as-a-platform thing aka HTML5, but in what extent and when? And what shall we do until that time has come, or until the older IE browser park has updated?

A quick video demonstrating how Firebug can be used to debug an Ajax problem.

Open question about how folks make decisions on how much/how well they will support non-JavaScript enabled clients.

A look at how you can use jQuery and ColdFusion to detect when an session has ended while using an AJAX call.

A quick look at jQuery's ajaxSetup feature.

Can we detect when a request is made to our server via an Ajax-based call as opposed to a 'normal' request? In this entry I talk about how you can accomplish such a task with jQuery and ColdFusion.

Welcome to (yet another) recap of jQuery-related items. The first day of Spring brings us... jQuery UI 1.7.1 : This is a 'point' release for the jQuery UI library. You can view a changelog for an official list of what...

A review of interesting jQuery finds from the past week.

In part 1 of this article I showed you how to a build your own widget using SpryDOMUtils and SpryEffects. In this article we are going to evolve the widget, making it more powerful, unobstructive and easier to use. We...

The Adobe Spry Framework is ideal for creating your own little widgets using existing Spry components as your tools. The best thing about Spry is that it requires very little knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS. With the two files...

Friday Google announced a new RIA platform called Google Native Client (NaCl). NaCl provides a browser plug-in that allows your browser to run C/C++ applications directly on your x86 processor.

Prototype is one of the more popular JavaScript libraries and is used on a number of popular HTML based web applications, like Twitter and Apple's mobile me.

Last week, Microsoft released Rich IntelliSense for jQuery for Visual Studio 2008. This will also work for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. This comes a month after the anouncement that jQuery will be shipping with future releases of VS 2008, making jQuery the official JavaScript framework for developing .NET AJAX applications.

Wow, this was an active poll. After nearly 500 votes, with almost 50% of the vote, Dojo is the clear winner. JQuery takes second place with over 20% of the vote and the rest share the remaining 30%. So, it...

The AJAX development community certainly has a large variety of frameworks to choose from. So, our new poll question asks which you currently prefer. I know that most AJAX developers have used more that one of these and may even...

jQuery has been quickly gaining ground over the course of the bast couple of years and with the announcement by Microsoft and Nokia, jQuery it could come to dominate the Ajax market.

Duane Nickull is back with episode 10 of Duane's World. This episode features Clive Goodinson talking about AJAX, Flash, Pixton, PHP and other technologies. It also includes a demo of Pixton which is a comic book animator.

Douglas Crockford's book "JavaScript: The Good Parts" describes a powerful subset of JavaScript that uses only the "good parts" of JavaScript and ignores the rest.