Ajax

MS Doloto tool said to speed large-scale Ajax applications

According to Microsoft’s Soma  Somasegar, the company released Doloto, a tool that analyzes Ajax application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large web applications.  The tool comes out of Microsoft’s research labs. Doloto is said to make pages more responsive by decreasing the initial download size of Ajax apps. These apps, if you haven’t noticed, are getting bigger and bigger, containing more and more lines of code.

According to Somasegar:

Doloto enables applications to initially transfer only the portion of client-side JavaScript code necessary for application initialization. The rest of the application’s code is replaced by short stubs; their actual function code is transferred lazily in the background or on-demand on first execution. Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with your web application much sooner without waiting to download code that implements features they’re not currently using.

Developers down on code generation beware: Doloto not only profiles your code, it re-writes it.

Web services to turn on televisions

Word out of this year’s Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas is that Yahoo will be making a Widget Development Kit (WDK) available to developers on a limited basis. The kit helps developers create JavaScript- and XML-based applications that run on top of normal television pictures and are navigable via TV remote control. Yahoo made the announcement together with Samsung Electronics. The plan is to create a new Internet-based service to Samsung televisions starting in the spring of 2009.

Related “TV Web services” info
Yahoo Connected TV - Yahoo

Rails rally cry heard in .NET framework arena

Rails as a lightweight framework is getting a look-see from many in the developer community. The Ruby-based architecture walks developers though the common practice of Web application building. “It gives you an object-relational map and does the mapping for you,” said the co-author of the new book, “Rails for .NET Developers.” These authors see value for Rails, even for .NET development teams. Lighter is better, they suggest. Of course Microsoft is tracing these developments too, and has a Ruby software effort, known as IronRuby, underway. The trends are discussed in Rich Seeley’s piece, “.NET Web developers ride Ruby and Rails.”

Browser War: Beneath the Chrome is the Gears

Patrick Mueller is a CTO Team person at IBM Rational. He also is a heck-of-a blogger. His take on Chrome is of interest because he goes right straight to the asychronous messaging model implcit in the Gears implmentation at the heart of the Google Chrome browser

One of the downers, for most people, with the current WorkerPool APIs, is going to be the message sending paradigm. It’s pretty low-level and raw. The great thing is that asynchronous message sends are a type of atomic building block upon which other forms of IPC can easily be built. The QNX operating system is famously built up on this core concept, slightly expanded.

He discusses building an RPC-styled worker mechanism in a blog entry called Fun with WorkerPools. Don’t miss it, because the story includes a web service known as the Pirate Speak Translator.

JavaScript finds Harmony

The Web wins, says Nexaweb’s CTO Jeremy Chone analyzing what happened with the ECMAScript working group Harmony decision announced earlier this month. “This is really good for the Web.”

In his view, the debate was whether ECMAScript a.k.a JavaScript was going to become a compiled language or retain its dynamic character. The decision to retain JavaScript’s dynamic quality has now been resolved, Chone told SOATalk. Although he acknowledges that at some level the debate will continue.

Chone’s take on this can be found on his blog.

If you are still trying to figure out what’s what with Harmony, ECMAScript, JavaScript et al, Alex Russell provides some very helpful explanations and definitions on the Ajaxian site.

Monson-Haefel talks of Curl as Ajax frameworks grow

Some of the challenge to architects these days comes not from the server side where so much integration effort has been placed, but from the client side. There, Ajax has arisen to improve users’ interactions with multiple application services.

But, as Richard Monson-Haefel told SearchSOA.com’s Rich Seeley, the unending proliferation of thinly supported open-source Ajax frameworks may cause architects for proprietary RIA-alternatives to Ajax. The long-time Burton Group analyst recently took a spot in the Curl brain trust.

Rich writes of his conversaion with Monson-Haefel in How to sort out Ajax and RIA frameworks. Monson-Haefel cites Curl, Flash and Silverlight among RIA choices some individuals are now considering. What do you think?

Dojo for Ajax gets enterprise push from Nexaweb

Can a free open source Ajax toolkit handle enterprise applications?

That’s the question Nexaweb Technologies Inc. is hoping to answer in the affirmative with today’s announcement that it is contributing new software to the Dojo Foundation to provide the structured approach favored for enterprise Ajax development.

The software, dubbed ‘dojo.E,’ will allow developers to create enterprise Ajax, said Jeremy Chone, CTO at Nexaweb Technologies Inc., who adds that Dojo is one of the industry’s most advanced sets of open source Ajax tools.

In his view Dojo will be ready for prime time with the structure dojo.E provides and visual tooling, which he said would be the next step.

“What we’re doing is we’ve enhanced Dojo with a structural language, which is XML,” Chone explained.

Asked how this will make Dojo better suited for business applications, he said: “The business benefits of dojo.E on top of Dojo is three things. One is the code is more structured. Two, you have reusability so you can reuse the components. Three, you can have visual tooling because now that it is structured and well defined you can have visual tools to organize your Ajax.”

Tom Rhinelander, analyst, New Rowley Group, agreed that Nexaweb’s contribution to Dojo will offer developers a choice they don’t usually have in selecting open source tools for Ajax.

“Developers have often had to choose between free Ajax toolkits that delivered interactivity but didn’t make it easy to maintain the code base, and commercial or commercially-sponsored rich Internet application (RIA) toolkits that weren’t as widely accepted but made it much easier to program and maintain code,” the analyst said. “Nexaweb’s dojo.E offers developers a more structured way to develop and maintain their interactive Web apps, using an XML markup language while also leveraging the popular Dojo toolkit.”

More information on dojo.E is available at a new Website for the tools.