A number of times I have felt need of an online JavaScript editor specially when I’m away from my PC, or on the move. jsFiddle is a great webapp that lets you edit HTML, JavaScript, CSS just like a normal IDE like Dreamweaver would do, all the syntax highlighting. The screen gets divided into 4 sections: HTML, CSS, Javascript and Result (Preview) as Read further »

It was predicted long back that RIA (Rich internet Applications) no longer needs Flash’s domination. AJAX/ JQuery, HTML 5, CSS will together form the best army against the closed Flash (which can’t be open sourced). Though few predict that HTML5 would kill Flash, it’s more evident that HTML5 will innovate new web applications Read further »

In the need for speed, Facebook had been working under the hood to boost PHP runtime to crazy levels which were not possible before. Facebook has now Open sourced the underlying code, as predicted. The PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, but it comes with an extra effort: The PHP is translated to C++ (which is of course more efficient) which is then compiled with g++. The project is called HipHop and has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past 2+ years. With HipHop, Read further »

PHP offers a light-weight runtime for small-to-medium sized webapps. If you are not a PHP developer, you will be surprised to know that PHP doesn’t support multithreading natively, though there are ways to make it possible. People have often come up with solutions to mock multithreading but still PHP sucks at performance as far as large applications are concerned. Update: Facebook’s PHP Runtime HipHop, now Open Source Most industry applications fallback Read further »

From practical apps like Google Wave, Gmail (mobile), we’ve seen that minimal client caching can be a good idea for most web applications. However, faster internet fades away half of the value. But for the mobile, the growing contender of the internet, it still makes a lot of sense. Till now, the most popular method for local storage had been limited potential HTTP cookies or Google Gears for a few. All Cookies can do is key-value pairs of strings that are stored locally in a text file of 4KB max. Read further »

HTML 5 comes with alot of promise for the web.  It has lot of new features that could make Web Browsers and Apps much more powerful than they ever were. Let’s go by an example. Try accessing Gmail on iPhone or Android phone,  you will have notice some differences from what it used to be a month ago. The new thing worth noticing is the introduction of the offline access. Gmail Read further »

Web Services are the key point of Integration for different applications belonging to different Platforms, Languages, systems. It wouldn’t be wrong if you call Web-services as the “Rendezvous point of the Business”. I’ve been using HTTP and SOAP since several years new. REST is rather new. SOAP revolutionized RPC and loose coupling  beyond the restrictions posed by  earlier protocols. However off late I have been giving APIs and interfaces considerable thought and am leaning a lot more towards simple HTTP based APIs with an XML or JSON response format as opposed to SOAP. Let’s try to discuss all the aspects one by one. Before we start, Let’s do a basic terminology headsup - Read further »

Earlier in my article about HTML 5, we were excited to mention addition of open source video codec. But the bad news is here. HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, the Google employee who maintains the burgeoning web-coding standard has announced. Ian Hickson wrote that he was reluctantly dropping the open standard due to opposition from Apple, and said the rival H.264 codec could also not be specified due to opposition from other browser vendors. This means HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for web development. One of the key features of HTML 5 is its native handling of rich media such as video and audio. However, “there is no Read further »

JavaFX meets TaranFX. JavaFX is built on top of a mature Runtime that gives developer’s amazing features. Java being in market since several years, they now have a more sophisticated API. Update: This Blog post is Winner of Java Blogging Contest. So what is JavaFX Hype all about? I first got to hear about JavaFX more than a year back when I attended Sun Tech days. It wasn’t very mature at that time and failed to catch my attention. It was this year in Feb, when I saw a momentum and maturity in this platform, which encouraged me to take my steps further. JavaFX gives developers an amazing feature-Rich API which will help Read further »