1. Back button becomes Cancel
2. Submit button becomes Save
3. Tons of open source frameworks to bridge to the backend
4. Code does not need to exist on the client beyond connection scripts; JavaScript can be sent to browser to be executed; basically remote invoking via passing of code (aka using eval with JavaScript received from the result handler)
5. ThinkCAP is a program by a company called ClearNova; it is made up of an IDE visual layout tool, a JavaScript framework, and Java servlet backend, all to create web applications via AJAX; you can toggle AJAX functionality off
6. Rich Internet Applications was a word that rolled off the presenter’s tongue with no problems.
7. Many are now thinking of building web applications, not websites; key difference in mindset & goal
8. Many just discovering the wonders of Prototype
9. Java peeps are still interested in learning about Laszlo

To go into more detail, it was fantastic to have the AJAX community question the “breaking” of the back button; expanding on what Brandspanking new said in response to Mario Klingemann’s post. “Do we really need it?” This is an application, not a page by page metaphor. As a Flash Developer, my take is “no shit, Sherlock” but having another community, mainly Web Developers, echoing the sentiment on already engrained technologies says a lot, lends credence to our original claims, and helps the cause. Unlikely allies.

The questioning of conventional wisdom by that many more people on how the web is supposed to work is just great; really excited to have another movement going on.

What is scary is the Java developers all chomping at the bit; with the remote invocation (sending JavaScript to the browser which is then eval’d) allows them to have very little presentation logic/code on the client, allowing that to be stored in databases & templates.

Additionally, one good point made by one of the presenters, Steve Benfield, was how he thinks AJAX will shake up the open source framework community for Java. Many are page based metaphors; none think like application front-ends, like Flex does currently.

Another point my colleague, formerly of JBoss & Spring fame, Les brought up was there are clients who do not want, or can’t, install anything, and simply want to use installed software that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users (ie Java clustered backend). Since you can’t use Flash or Flex on the front-end for such situations, he has a valid point. Good thing I’ll just keep sucking at HTML & CSS to ensure I don’t get assigned to such projects.

Another point he brought up during the post-preso question phase; anyone done tests with 200,000 user requests?

Both Flash & AJAX both increase the amount of server requests, but reduce the bandwith of those requests. No one there could answer if the effects have been tested to actually cause problems. Yes, the bandwidth is lower, but you are now accepting more continous connections.

As all of my past clients, fulltime & contract, none have reported server errors which lead me to believe I’m either better at server-side coding than I thought, or more likely I’ve never had my applications reach the concurrent user base Les was asking about. Time will tell, but I’m banking on AMF vs. Gzipped strings.

It’ll be nice to have Java programmers screwing with a prototype language (JavaScript). Curious what the long term affects will be. Will they help find better conventions so prototypes can be used in team environments?

Really neat demo of ThinkCAP. Really cool to see a small(?) company build a RIA development tool, complete with JavaScript framework & back-end which allows easy plugging to things like Spring, Hibernate, and other frameworks.

Did I mention it was funny to see a Java programmer showing his code, and he wrote it like this?

this.addStyle = function()
{
// stuff
};

BWAHAHA!!! Awesome…

Thanks again, Burr!

Before you go, “Aw man, no one gives a hoot… your so late to the party, brah!” or “I don’t care about browsers, dork”, here me out.

This whole “blah blah site doesn’t support Firefox” etc. I find frankly annoying, whiny, and curious why I should give a frigin’ care. I use IE; it works, comes pre-installed, and most everything I do works in IE. The security flaws are only exploited, in my experience, on less savory websites where one shouldn’t frequent anyway (unless you know what your doing).

I was tasked at work to research XUL and it’s capabilities. So, I’m really digging using Mozilla’s rendering engine for XUL. It’s pretty neat that it’s nearly identical to HTML and forms development, but they have their own framework + rendering engine + installation system devoted to just this process. I never could get my Chrome install to work, the lack of proper GUI’s for this 2 year-old (it’s older, but most good forum posts start in 2002 that I saw) technology is pathetic, and it was extremely diffucult to debug (I found out later about the developer install/debug version).

So, I’m testing things in Firefox because it appears to be more progressive in it’s use of extensions. Therefore, I’d have a plethora of examples to take apart and examine. I consider myself a window management meister. In Windows, one must master this skill to remain sane and remotely productive. I’ve found the positives in that skillset to help justify the constant clicking and moving. I then started using tabs in Firefox to switch between XULPlanet.com, Macromedia’s LiveDoc’s on their implementation, and my sample app running locally because I had other IE windows open. On dual monitors with lots of RAM, I’ll load those suckers up with windows.

Next thing I know, I’m using other tabs for normal websites like Full As A Goog, and others to browse in my spare time. As of yesterday, I started my day opening Firefox instead of IE to visit the Goog. I then started doing it at home.

Now, my blatant disregard for web standards probably ticks off the w3c-nazi’s, and assure’s you I’m missing the whole point. My confusion, however, stems on how the heck did a “browser” grow on me? I’m not all into web browsing as an experience. To me, it’s a frikin’ tool, end of story. And yet… here I am writing a blog entry about how frustrated I am; I feel violated, befuddled, abashed, “How could this happen?”

Anyway, if you have time, give Firefox a week, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s just a stupid browser, you think initially. Who cares. Mozilla sux, why would this be any different, right? Bloody hell, I just realized I’m blogging in it, too.

Damn browser. I’ll tell you, though, if IE got tabbed browsing, I’d probably go back to IE… but the CSS button and the RSS buttons are cool too. Weird man. I never thought I’d care.

“To help offset the cost to continue to provide this service, we will be adding contextual advertising before and after the search results. This advertising will be delivered by Google, our advertising partner. The ‘sponsored links’ will be purely text-based and will be driven off the search keywords entered. They will be visually distinct from your search results, so your visitors know what results are for your site, separate from the advertising.”

I will not allow advertising on my site, and I know of a peer of mine who’s company is having similiar problems with this recent news. I’m sure I could probably use the default MoveableType search engine for my site, but that wouldn’t work for my friend.

Anyone know of a free search engine I can use for my site and/or others? It will replace the current search functionality I have now.

<a href=”http://www.myvirtualmodel.com”>Virtual Model dot com</a>

I believe I heard about this awhile ago… even an idea of scanning in your true physique in the future to actually have the clothing try ons be more valid. The fact that other clothing sites support this is kind of neat. It is an example of using one application’s features via another… just like Central does!

<a href=”http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/activexchanges.asp#related_topics”>MSDN Article</a>

My manager found the link Microsoft has for explaining exactly how the changes work in the new IE and how to work “around” them. You just set the new attribute for the object tag, NOEXTERNALDATA=”true”, and your good to go, even if your object tag has param tags. The issue is, if your param tags use external data not on your site, then that data won’t work.

Therefore, even existing Flash sites, it seems from reading this, won’t break; no javascript bs needed. Me? I just use <param name=”movie” value=”myMovie.swf”> in a webpage on www.jessewarden.com. This is fine, because the SWF is not from an external domain, but from my site, so no dialogue box for the user.

If that’s all there is too it, then it certainly won’t affect anything I’ve ever done, and I suspect a lot of the disinformation out there is causing people to “fix” things that don’t need to be fixed. They outta test in the new browser before they do so. Just to add to the validity of this, I tested in the new IE browser beta side-by-side with the old IE. Below are the results.

:: tests ::

Uh… ok, Microsoft’s solutions don’t work. Below is the code which I’ll tear apart in the following paragraphs.

&lt;object NOEXTERNALDATA=&quot;false&quot;
classid=&quot;clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000&quot; codebase=&quot;http://download.macromedia.com/
pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0&quot; width=&quot;200&quot; height=&quot;200&quot; align=&quot;
middle&quot;&gt;
&lt;param name=&quot;movie&quot; value=&quot;http://www.jessewarden.com/friends.swf&quot; /&gt;<br>
&lt;
param name=&quot;allowScriptAccess&quot; value=&quot;sameDomain&quot; /&gt;<br>
&lt;
param name=&quot;quality&quot; value=&quot;high&quot; /&gt;<br>
&lt;
param name=&quot;wmode&quot; value=&quot;transparent&quot; /&gt;
&lt;embed src=&quot;http://www.jessewarden.com/friends/friends.swf&quot; width=&quot;200&quot; height=&quot;200&quot; align=&quot;middle&quot; quality=&quot;high&quot; wmode=&quot;transparent&quot; allowScriptAccess=&quot;sameDomain&quot; type=&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash&quot; pluginspage=&quot;http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer&quot;
/&gt;
&lt;/object&gt;

Alrigth, first off, my param tags are not external content. My site is hosted on www.jessewarden.com, and my Flash file is on www.jessewarden.com. However, setting NOEXTERNALDATA to true prevents the SWF from ever being loaded… IE just hangs there indeifinately (the new beta one).

The article cleary states, “If the OBJECT element used to load the control contains PARAM elements but none of the PARAM elements specify a source of data external to the current Web page, then the control does not access remote data.”

The example they give references the URL property. Funny, if I comment out EVERYTHING (I actually removed because the comments showed up in one of my tests), I get the Flash object, but the blank white screen when there is no Flash movie target.

&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;<br>
&lt;
object NOEXTERNALDATA=&quot;false&quot; classid=&quot;clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000&quot; width=&quot;200&quot; height=&quot;200&quot; align=&quot;middle&quot;&gt;
&lt;param name=&quot;movie&quot; value=&quot;friends.swf&quot; /&gt;
&lt;/object&gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;

This tells me that the article is correct; if something DOES reference an external piece of data, basically the object doesn’t get the variable. In this case, Flash never got the “movie” property, therefore the SWF was never loaded. So, yes, the Flash object shows up, but no Flash movie gets loaded. I tried derivates using codebase and classID above; adding them and removing them, all failed. Tried uncommenting certain params, even tried using src instead of movie, still no dice.

There was one instance when I removed the embed, and kept the classid it worked, but all the 10 other tests I did didn’t, therefore leading me to believe it was a fluke, and a cache issue.

As stated, I removed the classid and codebase attributes together, seperately, etc. making as many different combinations I could think of; commenting out params, deleting the params instead of commenting out, leaving the embed tag in the first instances, and deleting it to test; all failed.

Therefore, here are my conclusions.

<b>Conclusions</b>
1) The Flash param tag “movie”, even if relative or hardcoded to the same domain, the new IE still interprets as external to the domain. Therefore, unless this is solved, there is no way to use this solution for 2 reasons: you still have a param tag which prevents you from using rule 1 in the article, and the param tag, even though it may use local data to the web page (whatever that means at this point) the new IE still will interpret as remote, therefore not passing to the Flash object, therefore preventing the Flash object from loading a SWF.
2) The only way, then, is to use external JavaScript, as the Flash object, for IE anyway, requires as least 1 param tag: the movie one.

For right now, I’ve got my NOEXTERNALDATA on my site set to false, as at least it consistently works in both browsers. I thought this article was my savior, but I couldn’t get it to work. Then again, I’m a Flash guy, not a web guru.

<b>Future Trepidations</b>
Even if someone gets the param tag way to work, my <a href=”http://www.erikbianchi.com”>co-worker</a> just told me of something that he read last week that indicates that this is just a proposal. Microsoft’s article is very cool, concise, and neat how they mention “around” in it, hehe, but the issue remains that if EOLAS doesn’t find it acceptable, this whole thing is for naught.

Secondly, the article has a horrible reference to permantly blocking controls. “Using the settings on the Advanced tab on the Internet Options dialog, users can choose to have affected controls blocked by default. When a control is blocked, alternate content is rendered in place of the controls when available, and the user is presented with a notification that the page contains blocked controls. The following image shows the notification that users see when affected controls are blocked.”

Holy phish… if that is somehow turned on, ALL Flash content is not rendered. The user is informed via those annoying text bubbles. Hopefully, most users won’t click it immediately away without reading it like I do and then turn all controls back on to be shown. Thankfully, if it happens again, the bubble itself has a link in it to easily allow the user to not only turn the controls back on, but also to refresh the page: good job Microsoft! Still, this is uncool. I know dynamic web pages are the things of now, but being FORCED to do it this way is kind of dumb. As long as Microsfoft confirms it is the ONLY way, though, is what concerns me, because I tried their first way, and from my tests, it doesn’t work.

<b>Hypothesis</b>
At any rate, I really think it may possibly Macromedia who can make the first one work. If they can change the Flash Player enough to read URL variables from the FlashVar’s param tag instead of the sppended ones like they did in the Flash 6 Player, then maybe they can update the Flash 7 Player to do the same thing with the movie param tag. One can only hope.

*sigh*

The war continues…