Google today announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in that selectively upgrades Internet Explorer without breaking existing sites. Think of it as working like Flash, but for open web technologies, replacing Internet Explorer’s entire rendering engine for sites that include a single meta tag indicating that they would prefer to use Chrome Frame rather than IE.
So why is this a good thing?
If you’re attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London in early October, be sure to introduce yourself. I’m excited to learn the results of the 2009 Web Application survey.
After the conference, you can learn more about SitePen and the future of Dojo at these post-conference events:
Orbited, cometD-python, and other Python Comet servers have new competition in the form of Facebook’s now open source Tornado web server. Tornado was part of the technology acquired by Facebook when they purchased FriendFeed last month, and Facebook has decided to open it up under the Apache version 2 license.
Tornado supports long-polling and HTTP streaming, but also includes many of the web site building blocks found in frameworks like Django. This is a really exciting announcement as Facebook and Google (with their Wave product) have both made major announcements around Comet technologies, bringing real-time capabilities to the mainstream, under open source licenses.
In the continuing blurring of the lines between web and desktop, Apple has moved the iTunes Store in iTunes 9 to use WebKit as its rendering engine. I was actually surprised to learn this was not always the case, especially with Apple adding Safari for Windows a while back.
The rest of iTunes remains a custom desktop user interface, but it would not surprise me to see iTunes 10 be completely rendered using open web techniques. We already see competing products like Songbird using open web technologies for rendering media players, and it could eventually lead to a version of iTunes that lives inside Mobile Me, with songs stored in the Apple cloud.
Given Apple’s recent push on efforts like Time Machine and Mobile Me, it seems like Apple is working hard towards the important goal of making it very easy for users to not lose their data and work, and moving the iTunes franchise to the web would seem to be the next logical step!
I recently posted a proposal for an addition to JSON Schema, called JSON Hyper Schema, for defining the properties of a JSON structure that represent links or references within data structures. This is intended to provide the same linking capabilities of JSON Referencing, but in a much more flexible manner such that schemas can be used to describe link information in existing data structures without requiring a fixed convention. I wanted to exposit one of the further benefits of using this type of schema: satisfying the goals of namespacing in JSON.
Narwhal is an open source toolkit for server-side JavaScript that delivers a growing library of useful modules implementing the CommonJS standard library API. CommonJS is an effort to provide a standard library for server side JavaScript (or JavaScript in any privileged environment) and Narwhal is the most extensive implementation of the library API. Narwhal provides numerous system level functions and IO capabilities with streaming and File interaction.
Persevere is a framework for server-side JavaScript with object persistence and direct mapping to RESTful HTTP interaction. These two projects can complement each other very nicely and since Persevere implements the CommonJS API for module loading, Narwhal’s standard library of modules can now easily be utilized within Persevere.
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