Bespin – Cool editor project from Mozilla
Saw this come across the news feed today and thought it was pretty neat.
Pretty cool concept that I hope the flesh out.
PHP.js – A cool project recreating PHP function is Javascript
While checking out the new release of the PHP extension for Aptana I came across this cool project –
which is looking to recreate PHP functions in Javascript. Now while it’s better to just handle these
things with proper JS, it is nice to use when you already know the php syntax for a function. What I really want out of this is the print_r function because I’m always running into issues with trying to figure out an object in JS and there aren’t any ways I have found that are as nice as the print_r in PHP. I only use that in debugging and development and will be a great thing to have around for that.
So overall an interesting project to watch.
A great example of opensource at work
Just saw this interesting article on what Facebook was doing to help increase the performance of their memcache servers. Because of the outstanding talk I saw from Brian Shire of Facebook back at PHP|Tek 2007 I at least understood what was being discussed here. Though understanding the idea and being able to “actually” do anything about it are to completely different things. But because of the great concept that is called open source that doesn’t matter.
First, if it wasn’t for the open source development that is going on, Facebook would not be able to have this great app to start with. They would either have to write their own or purchase a solution, which from others similar ones I’ve seen advertised, never seemed cheap. Extra costs like those can easily turn an extremely profitable company into one that is barely scraping by. That doesn’t even include all the other issues of relying on closed 3rd party apps, but I’ll save that rant for another day.
Second, Facebook is willing to share the wealth and have released their source modifications for the rest of the world to have (from the talk I knew they were directly contributing back to the project but I think this is more for the real power hungry people out there.) Now while I’ll never be lucky enough to have a project that would need this kind of power, it’s nice to know that if I did run into this issue I don’t have to reinvent the wheel or pony up a ton of cash.
This is just another great example of how open source can really help the greater good. Now, if only everyone would jump on this concept.
Flex training
Well since you can get Flex Builder for free, why not have some free training to go along with this as well.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
That came across my reader the other day but I forgot about it so now it is shared. 
Future of Web Apps conference videos
The Future of Web Apps Conferences just happened recently, and they have videos up of the talks.
Great things to watch when you have time though it can be a bit of an overload.
Cool tool
Today while reading a cool nice article about someone researching a bunch of domains he found for some marketing campaign, he mentioned this cool tool.
http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/
I’d used similar services before but what was so cool about this one was you could get an entire list of the domains hosted at a specific IP range. Would be really easy to see all the clients a specific hosting company has with this. On top of that you can get tons more info about a specific domain which for this example I’ll a BBQ blog that I started and haven’t done much with, BBQ and the Works. Their whois tool gives you the standard stuff that most other similar services do but there is also so much more.
Looking at this run on my site you can see they find other domains registered by me, other domains on the same nameserver, and even some SEO stuff. Overall this is a great little tool you can play with and really learn some great stuff about a site.
Never underestimate the power of VB
Updated Link because the previous one was removed.
It must be .Net that gave it the killer tracking power.
With Silverlight they could even bring this super powerful app to the web.
Got to love Hollywood Though I figure most people who program in a Microsoft language sound like this. I kid, I kid.
At HighEdWeb 2008
I’m hear, sitting in the first session. Pretty good talk about looking at accessibility for people with disabilities. Lots of stuff we are doing wrong
I’m up next after this, added examples from the last talk. Freaking out as always but it’s only 45 minutes long so should be in like flint.
More on Google Chrome
Well it’s been blowing up on the web which is no big surprise. I’ve had more time to play with it and have a few more observations from myself and others on the web.
More after the jump
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Google Chrome
Google Chrome was released today. It’s nice to see the rumor finally become true. I’ve had about an hour of playing with it and this is what I can see.
Plus
- Based on Webkit which has a lot of CSS3 features so that gives us a place to play with all those cool new functions. Granted they will only work in this browser it’s still overall cool.
- Google Gears by default. I’ve recently come to love the idea of gears to do a lot of cool things with applications in the browser. It fills a different role then AIR which I also have love for but it will be nice to also be able to just tell someone to download chrome and go to an address then to have to have them install a plugin in a browser.
- Being able to treat applications like applications. This is where it more directly attacks AIR which is interesting. We will see how well this goes because you have a lot of control with AIR and I’m not sure what all can be done with Chrome. Only time will tell with this one.
- Task Menu. I haven’t had to kill anything yet (I have just for fun though) so not sure how well this will work but it will be great if I can kill that rogue tab that’s acting up as opposed to having it lock up and kill my whole browser.
Neutrals
Only one at moment but haven’t seen anything on extensions yet which I’ve been interested in with Firefox and would love to see what can be done with this.
Cons
- Bookmarks – Just don’t like how they are done. Couldn’t find a way to organize and so not really sure what this will turn into. Hopefully this gets cleaned up in some way
- New JS engine – This could end up being a positive but for now it’s a negative. For the apps I use it hasn’t been any faster then Firefox. If it does become significantly faster that would be great but we will see. I’m hoping it doesn’t have the memory issues Firefox has but I haven’t left it open with a ton of tabs yet. My concern is that it’s another engine we have to worry about when writing code. I’m just not looking forward to having to find the little differences in another engine. But this could turn into a huge positive if all this stuff pans out to be a non-issue.
Well I’ll keep playing with it for a few weeks and we where it goes. Right now it’s not a Firefox killer but we will see. What it will probably do is become my second browser for testing things when I need to be logged into 2 different accounts on the same site for testing. IE was currently filling that role but I’m fine dumping that.