Javascript

Saturday, August 23. 2008

Firefox to get massive JavaScript performance boost

Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. The code was merged today (but is not yet ready to be enabled by default in the nightly builds) and is planned for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, the next incremental update of the open-source web browser.

They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases. They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues.

via Slashdot, ars technica

Saturday, August 16. 2008

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization

The web is made of open standards. This was a significant factor in the web’s displacement of proprietary application platforms. Openness is hugely attractive, so much so that the web dominates over competitors with better technologies. The difficult tradeoff that comes with a standards-based approach is that it is difficult to innovate. As a result, the basic technologies of the browser have been stalled for a decade. What innovation we’ve enjoyed, such as the Ajax revolution, has come by mining all of the latent, accidental potential of the existing standards. That potential has been used up.

Thursday, July 10. 2008

Projects abound

I apologize for the lack of updates recently. Between work, meetings, and fun little side projects, I've practically been coding in my sleep. I'll be back to a full time posting schedule soon, I promise. In the mean time, here's a little bit of a description of the projects I've been working on.

Magus - An old school web based RPG / Collectible card game. Collect, buy, sell and trade cards to build powerful decks to duel your opponents. Nearly feature complete, in final testing before our first invite-only release.

Semantic IO - A flexible semantic input/output engine. Enter a file, text, or a URL and pull out an array of useful information. Quickly find phone numbers, addresses, names, or custom searches. Summarize long articles. Find keywords. Automatically tag bodies of text. Full i18n support.

And lastly, I'll be slowly updating and adding (literally) hundreds of research scripts, snippets, and documents to my resources. So - If there's anything specifically that you'd like to improve at or have an idea you want to share or explore - leave a comment. I'd love to hear from some of you lurkers.

Saturday, November 17. 2007

67 Killer Resources for Web Developers and Designers

As a designer or developer, efficiency, proficiency, and timeliness are of the essence. The quicker we can implement our ideas, and go from a mock up to fully documented, functional code, the better. Here are 67 killer resources to help you get the job done quicker, and easier than ever. All of my favorite (mostly) open source tools, with some Ajax, PHP Frameworks, Palette tools, Icons and layouts, MySQL tools and managers, RSS parsers and more. And there's plenty more where that came from.
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