John Resig, a programmer working for the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library spent last weekend putting together a server-side browser/DOM environment that he’s released on his blog. The application, written entirely in JavaScript, runs on top of Mozilla’s open source JavaScript implementation called Rhino. Read the rest of this entry »
Pownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends.” It’s a one-to-many “social messaging” application like Twitter, but it packs a bunch of additional features (full review). Backed by Digg.com founder and web wunderkind Kevin Rose, Pownce is a high visibility project with a good chance of success. The site held up fairly well to a barrage of traffic after its launch, which made me wonder what makes it tick. Lead developer Leah Culver was kind enough to answer some questions via email. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s rather ironic that, while search is nearly ubiquitous on the web, there is no perfect solution for adding search functionality to a web application. Many developers simply use the basic search functionality built into whatever database server they’re using. Until recently, systems that required a more feature-rich, efficient, or flexible search solution had to turn to proprietary commercial software. But this is no longer the case. Apache’s Lucene project has brought the open source community a sophisticated and flexible search solution that rivals most commercial packages. Read the rest of this entry »
After more than a year of development, the long awaited stable release of Zend Framework is finally here. Zend Framework is a fully object-oriented PHP 5 class library that was carefully designed to be modular and flexible. It includes components for authentication & authorization, internationalization, efficient database access, and utilities for consuming and exposing web services, among many other things. Broadly stated, the project’s goal is to “provide the most commonly required 90% of the value you need… leaving you the ability to custom build that last 10% to meet your specific business needs.” Read the rest of this entry »
After explaining this process several times, and looking over the search terms that have led people to my article on making Google Gadgets, I’ve decided to answer this question once and for all. Turning a supported feed (Atom 0.3 or 1.0, or RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, or 2.0) into a simple Google Gadget is trivially easy, and can be done in a few simple steps. Read the rest of this entry »
Google and Microsoft have been trading antitrust complaints over the past few months. Most recently, Google filed a confidential complaint with the Justice Department asking that Microsoft be forced to alter the desktop search functionality in Vista to better accommodate third-party search applications. Surprisingly, Microsoft quickly acquiesced to Google’s request, agreeing to modify Vista to address the concerns in a service pack scheduled for release at the end of this year. Read the rest of this entry »
This tutorial is intended for advanced audiences. If you’re new to regular expressions, or if you could use a quick refresher, go read my intro to regular expressions, and work through a few examples. Trust me, it’ll be one of the most rewarding twenty minutes you’ve ever spent. If you’re familiar with the basic regex concepts then read on and learn all you need to know to be a regex pro. Read the rest of this entry »
As many of you are already aware, Google announced a new product last week called Google Gears (I wrote an intro to the toolkit a few days ago). After playing around with Gears for a while I realized that I could use it to solve a problem that has bothered me for some time: I can’t read blogs offline! WP-Offline is a WordPress plugin that lets your readers cache your entire blog for offline reading using Google Gears. Read the rest of this entry »
Just last week Google announced street view at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. The new feature, which lets users view 360 degree panoramic photos from the streets of several major US cities, received lots of press despite the fact that Amazon’s A9 maps had a similar feature that launched some time ago (though Google’s UI is definitely a lot cooler).
Google is an interesting company to watch. They frequently surprise people (myself included) by making unexpected acquisitions and launching new products out of the blue. Since my interests span both technology and business, I’m often left wondering what the big picture is — what is Google’s “10 year plan,” so to speak. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, Google announced Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets web applications work offline (though I think there are more interesting ways to use the platform). Lots of blogs have picked up the story, including TechCrunch, Mashable, and lifehacker. But most simply regurgitate information from Google’s official press release. They don’t explain how the platform works at all.
I’ve spent the morning reading over the Gears documentation, and working through some sample applications. Here are my notes. I’m hoping they’ll provide enough of an overview to get started with Gears without wading through dozens of pages of documentation yourself. Read the rest of this entry »
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