more Tamarin and Mozilla reading...

For those so inclined, some interesting reads regarding some expert thoughts on Tamarin, Mozilla, Firefox, Adobe, JavaScript ...

Brendan Eich (Mozilla):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/03/the_open_web_and_its_adversari.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/11/project_tamarin.html

Anne Zelenka (Red Monk):
http://redmonk.com/anne/2007/01/08/why-open-is-good/

Emmy Huang (Adobe):
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/ehuang_tamarin.html

Using Firebug in IE, Opera, Safari

Most people know about Firebug, as a plugin to Firefox... but you can also debug javascript in other browsers with Firebug, by installing Firebug Lite.

http://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html

It's awesome to include a .js file, open up Internet Exploder, and use alot of the Firebug goodness to check browser compatibility. (after test, or prior to loading to your production webserver, simply comment out that line of .js and you won't take a hit when it comes to page load times).

Here is some more Firebug documentation and references from their site:
http://www.getfirebug.com/docs.html

Core Javascript & Ajax Development Links

...some handy references for all of us writing Javascript and Ajax apps (specifically with Prototype.js, but many of the links help writing and testing JS in general) Enjoy:

Core Javascript 1.5 Reference
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference

Javascript Style Guide on Mozilla's Development Center:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript_style_guide

Prototype Javascript Framework API docs:
http://www.prototypejs.org/api

Script.aculo.us Effects Library tag docs:
http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/tags/

Dan Webb's LowPro.js:
http://www.danwebb.net/2006/9/3/low-pro-unobtrusive-scripting-for-prototype

Joe Hewitt's Firebug plugin docs and download:
http://www.getfirebug.com/docs.html

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

Selenium:
http://www.openqa.org/selenium/

"Quality", by Douglas Crockford

Insightful presentation by Douglas Crockford on "quality". Engaging and worth watching:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=529579

Tamarin Project -- Adobe contributes to Mozilla

This is older news, but certainly worthy of repeating (now that I have a couple free hours to get my thoughts out).

If you're interested in where the future of client-side software development is going, definitely read this post and the related link from Ajaxian.com. It discusses 'Tamarin', which is a collaborative project between Adobe and Mozilla -- Adobe contributed source code from the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

What all of this means, as Brendan Eich states "now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser"

Especially insightful are the 'comments' section, where Brendan Eich (the individual who created the JavaScript language and one of the first people at Netscape, now the Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla) , explains the nature of performance gains that will come from a Just-In-Time JavaScript compiler.

http://hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-tamarin

All of this gives us insight into the web-centric paradigm that both Adobe and Mozilla (along with obviously Google and others) are pointed towards and that has huge momentum. This collaboration, along with items like Adobe Apollo (and other similar efforts by Sun, for instance), make it very motivating time to be a web application developer. We are at the beginning of a time pointing towards being able to create deeply rich web applications -- apps that run efficiently in a browser that is continually increasing in performance. These web applications can be programmed and run in a web-connected or disconnected mode.

The Ajax libraries and toolsets that have sprung up in the last few years (E.g. Prototype, Dojo, et al), along with the advancement of the browser itself, collaborations between Open Source and industry (Adobe, JVM and Flex), and many of the open source communities supporting this vision for the future of the web really gets me excited and motivated to wake up and write code, and dig deeper each day into the nuances of these technologies. Good times-

(ps, here is another good read: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/04/openness.html)

Javascript Compressors

Javascript compression is used by professional web developers to compress JS, and decrease the latency of page loads. Which compression tool do you use? Do you use any that aren't on this list? I'm interested in hearing what other people are using.

Dojo ShrinkSafe: uses Rhino (Javascript engine written in Javascript) to compress without regular expressions
http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/shrinksafe/

JSMin, The Javascript Minifier
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html

The Javascript Compressor:
http://javascriptcompressor.com/

(another useful link, not related to compression, but a tool that is helpful in writing Javascript in addition to Firebug: JSLint -- http://www.jslint.com/)

Firebug, Joe Hewitt; (high rez screencast from YUI Theater)

...Firebug is an unbelievable Javascript tool -- for creating, experimenting, and debugging Javascript. Check out Joe Hewitt's presentation:

"Web 2.0 -- The Machine is Us"

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