Recently I was writing a “tips and tricks” blog post that was going to focus on the idea that it is better to use an object as a “string buffer”; the idea was that by passing this object around to various functions and pushing string fragments into it, you can get better performance from a JavaScript engine. My friend and colleague Alex Russell challenged me to show him hard data supporting this hypothesis—and the results were quite eye-opening!

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The purpose of this article is to provide a list of advanced debugging techniques that are not easily found elsewhere on the web. Using Google to search for JavaScript debugging just gives you hundreds of articles about using alerts and how Firebug works. We all worship at the altar of Firebug, but there are things that can go beyond a console.log(). The following is a list of methods that every developer should have in their toolbox.

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Brad Neuberg, of the Gears team, took a stab at defining the “Open Web”. We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”. I think that Brad does a good job laying out the characteristics that have made the web successful thus far.

The one thing that I disagree with is this part of “Transparency”:

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Recently Apple delivered Safari 3.1 with some very exciting features. While we still can’t use things like multiple background images and drop shadows across all browsers, we are getting to play with the future and I, for one, am loving it. One of the most interesting things in Safari 3.1 is the (hopefully soon to be proposed and standardized as part of the CSS3 spec) CSS Animations. CSS animations allow you to animate just about any property on an element as well as do fun things like rotate and skew. As a demo of this I created a quick and dirty CSS3 fisheye/dock demo. As an added bonus, the demo uses SVG in the img tag.

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Today, I was eating lunch alone at a restaurant and reading some news via my iPhone’s EDGE connection. Suddenly, Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Optimizing Page Loading in the Web Browser made even more sense.

Apple has been putting actual dollars into making Safari and the underlying open source WebKit really, really fast. Safari 3 is significantly faster than Safari 2. There was another big speed boost after Safari 3.0.

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It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once. And of course when I do get to work on something like that, it usually means there is a significant amount of pressure to get it done and done quickly. My work on dojox.analytics has been one of those rare instances when I’ve been able to work in peace on writing simple and useful code that can entertain a wide variety of use cases.

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Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.

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While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch.

What is AIR?

It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

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Palo Alto, CA - February 25, 2008 - SitePen Inc. today announced updates to the Dojo Toolkit that allow Ajax developers to easily deploy web applications created with the Dojo Toolkit on Adobe® AIR™. Adobe collaborated with SitePen to revise the Dojo Toolkit and enable compatibility with Adobe® AIR™.

“The Dojo Toolkit is a popular and important toolkit for web application developers, and now Dojo Toolkit developers can seamlessly deploy their applications on Adobe AIR,” said Rob Christensen, senior product manager, Adobe AIR at Adobe. “We engaged with SitePen and their expert team of Dojo Toolkit Contributors to make this possible for developers.”

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In response to recent articles by Andy Clarke and David Baron, Alex recently said that the W3C cannot save us. The most significant point being made is that you cannot standardize the future, and you should not punish those who attempt to push the envelope through experimentation and invention.

In the late 90s, there was little in the way of web standards, but an amazing amount of progress and innovation. WASP and others heavily pushed browser vendors to properly implement HTML, CSS, and DOM standards. For the most part, they were successful with this effort, and with the effort of encouraging developers to use those standards.

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