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The WebKit developers just announced SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine for Safari (et others). To quote the developers: “SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.”

So instead of building and parsing a syntax-tree, like other Javascript-Engines do, SquirrelFish builds executable bytecode. You can find the new engine in the nightly builds. Good chance to play around with it and see how it performs with Javascript-heavy applications. I just rolled a test against our primary product at work, a big and extensive javascript layout application. One could really “feel” the speed differences.

If you’re in the market for a easy-to-use website creation software, you should head over to TUAW, as they’ve post a review of the new RapidWeaver 4. I’ve had version 3 courtesy of MacHeist 1 and liked it alot. Judging by the review over at TUAW, RapidWeaver 4 seems to be a great enhancement to a already incredible software.

The Web 2.0, with it’s simplified and enhanced usability paradigms, relies heavily on Ajax, as it’s main tool for managing the communication between client and server. In comparison to the old Web 1.0 way of sending a HTTP Request and recieving the complete site, Ajax, of course, allows to communicate just the changes and moves the view part of the process from the server to the client via Javascript. However, this makes it sometimes difficult to debug and especially to find ressource and performance hogs. If you ever created a web app which suddenly didn’t work at all anymore, because you have two concurrent never-ending HTTP connections going on via Ajax, you probably know what I’m talking about. 

The IBM developerWorks has an excellent article describing various tools which help in identifying those ressource hogs and performance problems, just as well as describing how to circumvent them. So if you’re into lowlevel Ajax programming, this could be worthwhile information for you.

For Web Developers, one of the most important plugins for FireFox is the FireBug. A enhanced in-Browser Javascript-Debugger (and more), that allows to quickly find bugs or monitoring odd behaviour. Drosera is a usefull application that offers similar features for WebKit-based browsers, like Safari.
So next time you have an odd bug in your Javascript-Code, instead of chasing it down via tiring alert() or console.log() sessions, you could just as well try Drosera, which offers an enhanced interface, and many a option similar to FireBug.

Drosera on the WebKit Wiki

The Ruby on Rails web application framework continues to catch more and more interest. Many improvements and added features in the recently-released Ruby on Rails 1.0 gave the community another boost.

Now Apple released an article which explains how to develop Ruby on Rais applications under Mac OS X. The even concentrates on using Textmate:

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. The premier text editor favored by legions of Rails programmers everywhere is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

I’ve read several Rails tutorials (and even completed some of them), and this one has much in common with the other ones available: it concentrates on creating a simple application, it tries to explain the basic ideas behind RoR. One good thing is that this article also introduces methods like ‘belongs to’, ‘has many’ or business logic, which are things not all Ruby on Rails beginner tutorials try to explain.

Developer.Apple.com: Ruby on Rails

Not to be confused with its Office line of software, Office is Microsoft’s latest foray into offering web based services.

The service is mainly for the small company of less than 25 people whose IT department is that one guy who took a introduction to computers class in college.

Office Live comes in three flavors of varying prices (all are free in the beta though). First there’s the Basic Live edition (which will remain free even when it goes Gold). This one contains general website development tools, the ability to have your own domain name, like, www.website.com, instead of something like www.bigwebsite.com/thing/ohwow/768865554.htm, five email accounts, and a website traffic report.

The next version of the software…. wait, is this software? It does not install on your computer. I hereby call it “serverware.” The next version is the Collaboration edition. It will cost around $30 once the beta ends and does not add much more to the Basic edition to justify its price.

The last one is Essentials, cost starts at $30 and it adds a whole slew of more email addresses (50), keyword reports, and more online workspace.

I signed up for the service, but since it’s a beta test, Microsoft itself picks who it wants to participate. If selected, I’ll report on the creation process with a self-made website.

Erraticwisdom wrote some very insightfull and interestings tips which help in organizing CSS files. It’s well worth checking out.

Erratic Wisdom: 5 Tips for Organizing Your CSS

Here are even more Photoshop tutorials and brushes for your pleasure; Happy layouting

Free Photoshop Brushes Resources

Our friends at Google have been busy analyzing slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results are really interesting, not only as they provide a detailed insight into standard class names or id names, but also as the Google authors review the results and reveal some interesting insights into how Google interpretes the html data.

and revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless than use the element!

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

Web 2.0 has been the new buzz-word for the past months now. If you either really don’t know what all of this is about, or still think that Web 2.0 is essentially Ajax, head over to Kevin Lynchs page and read his small review from the Web 2.0 conference, including essential tidbits from for example Tim O’Reilly, which should give you a deeper understanding of what the Web 2.0 really is about.

Web 2.0 explained