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