Hard to keep up with evolving web tech!

May 30, 2007

Whew!  The last several months have brought a flurry of web tech activity, the likes of which I haven’t seen in years.

Apollo/Silverlight/JavaFX all are aiming at reinventing in-browser development.

Yahoo Pipes, Ning, Coghead and some other platforms are giving us new ways to think about web-based development.

The YUI/Dojo/Scriptaculous/Atlas/jQuery/GWT AJAX toolkits – what can I say?  They each bring their own strengths to the front-end development arena.  It’s hard to go wrong choosing any of them, and they all illustrate the point that there’s very little reason to be doing AJAX by hand if you’re doing it at all (and I’d recommend looking at Aptana.com if you’re looking for a decent Javascript editor).

Dojo had introduced an interesting ability – the ability to use local storage.  A local storage API abstracted the read/write to local storage mechanisms, including cookies and Flash.  This Dojo functionality was pretty interesting, and may still be the best way to handle this sort of need in a cross-platform way, due to Flash’s current popularity and installed base.  It will throw up warnings after so many kilobytes of local storage for permission to use that much drive space, which may scare off a few people, but used judiciously, it’s a useful hack.

Google today announced Google Gears, a plugin which provides a local SQLite server, data cache management, and a worker pool to manage multiple worker processes, increasing browser app responsiveness (Firefox, I’m giving you the evil eye).  Some sample code from http://code.google.com/apis/gears/

  try {
    db = google.gears.factory.create('beta.database', '1.0');
  } catch (ex) {
    setError('Could not create database: ' + ex.message);
  }

  if (db) {
    db.open('database-demo');
    db.execute('create table if not exists Demo' +
               ' (Phrase varchar(255), Timestamp int)');

    // Initialize the UI at startup.
    displayRecentPhrases();
  }

I suspect this may be jumped on by many smaller ISVs as a way to provide local data storage and SQL-ish functionality in a cross-platform way.  There aren’t any real broadly supported, viable  options for client-side functionality apart from Windows, which isn’t cross-browser.  From what I’m reading, the Google Gears project is an open source project, which may mean it gets adopted and ported to other browsers besides the current IE and Firefox.  It’s released under the “New BSD” license, whatever that is, so I’m not 100% certain on that part, but it sounds open source enough for most usage.

I suspect I missing a number of other players in the emerging web technology space (Laszlo and Flex come to mind as well), but I’ve been struck by some of the cool developments over the past several months, and the Google Gears announcement today pushed me into posting this just now.

What cool web technologies have you come across recently?

Posted in Database, Development, Google, Java, Javascript, Software, Tools, Web, Yahoo, opensource