AJAX Magazine

Redline, jQuery Powered Racing Game

2008-11-22T07:09:28Z

Vertigo-projects have a new and amazing racing game powered by jQuery and using the GameQuery plugin. The game itself is about one thousand lines of code, but you will need some practice to not shift too early or to avoid crashing. It's interesting to see the level of applications that we can build today using modern javascript libraries such as jQuery. The design is pretty attractive to run a level or two, have a look and enjoy the race http://www.vertigo-project.com/projects/redline-game.

Gizmox Dares Hackers to Break Into Visual WebGui

2008-11-19T06:57:47Z

Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui open source platform, announced a contest, sponsored by the Company, which will pay $10,000 to anyone who can hack into its Visual WebGui Platform. The Contest will take the shape of an investigation into the identity of a secret agent. The goal of the contest is to uncover the true identity of their secret agent, code named OWL. The Contest will feature a flash movie presented within the Visual WebGui application that will contain the data necessary to uncovering the identity of the OWL. Participants will be required to provide a reproducible pathway into the Visual WebGui Pipeline (without having to penetrate any non Visual WebGui Peripherals) in order to claim the prize. The contest will begin on November 3rd and end December 31st, Participants must register to receive login information and contest details.

This is the location of the Security Challenge: http://www.visualwebgui.com/live/Security_Challenge

"We believe that our proprietary "Empty Client" portal is the most secure environment on the market and we are willing to put our money where our mouth is" Said Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox. "We don't make statements that our program is "unhackable" lightly, we have given this challenge to many people in the field and no one has been able to penetrate it, and we are sure that no one can!"

Gizmox is the Company that released Visual WebGui to the public in early 2008, is poised to create a new standard in cloud computing. Since its release there have been over 250,000 downloads of its DHTML version. Visual WebGui (VWG) is a new 'Web like Desktop' platform that offers open source rapid application development (RAD) framework for Line of Business AJAX & Silverlight applications atop the platform. VWG cuts down development time (proven up to 90%), without compromising on extensibility, scalability, performance, security or complexity.

Amazon Holiday Toylist powered by jQuery

2008-11-16T10:22:42Z

Amazon have just launched a new amazing shopping experience "Holiday Toylist" letting customers watch hundreds of toys, video games, sporting goods, electronic gadgets, and DVDs in action. You can see video of different products and navigate by age or price to find out the perfect gift. Navigation is too much fun using mouse or keyboard, you can zoom in to see product video, and zoom out to list available offers.

Interesting to have in the same time shop and play, especially when the shopping is about toys. The new service is powered by jQuery, pretty neat.

e-doc offers a simple yet powerful document management solution with VWG

2008-11-05T05:17:08Z

"Choosing Visual WebGui reduced largely the time of development and gave us an easy way to create an interface similar to windows. Our developers almost forgot they were developing a web application."

Overview

e-grou's provides software solutions to aid organizations in optimizing day to day tasks. Its core business is software development and distribution, especially in the document management area. e-doc was developed in order to provide enterprises with an efficient document management software. The specifications and development of this software solution are the result of over than 10 years of experience in consulting to implement third party solutions in our customers.

DHTMLX Ajax Components Suite Updated - Version 2.0 Brings Simplicity to Web Interface Creation

2008-10-14T08:28:50Z

St. Petersburg, Russia, October 13, 2008 - DHTMLX (dhtmlx.com) is pleased to announce the update of its dhtmlxSuite, a complete suite of Ajax-enabled components for building rich web interfaces. Version 2.0 brings a new approach to building application interface simply by arranging its modules via newly introduced dhtmlxLayout control. It not only allows developers to effortlessly construct interface structure, but also provides the possibility to easily compose DHTMLX components into a single layout.

The current release also includes important bug fixes and performance improvements together with unified skins and better mutual integration of the components. DHTMLX v2.0 introduces some new components such as:

dhtmlxLayout

A simple and affordable way of arranging elements of interface structure visually on page is now available through a new DHTMLX component - dhtmlxLayout. It provides a good deal of ready-made Layout patterns that can be applied to sophisticated web applications. The possibility to integrate other UI components from DHTMLX line into dhtmlxLayout panels easily is one more significant feature of this innovation.

dhtmlxAccordion

A new Accordion component is able to display several parts of content using multiple panes. The content displayed in each pane may vary from text and graphics to other dhtmlx components. All the dhtmlx components can be attached to the Accordion panel with a single script command.

Qooxdoo 0.8 Released - Open Source Ajax Framework

2008-10-06T07:01:42Z

Qooxdoo have just released version 0.8, one of the most interesting open-source, enterprise-level AJAX/RIA frameworks. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build impressive cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed.

It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved substantially.

Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5 Streamlines Buying Process and Increases Conversion Rates for eTailers

2008-09-03T20:18:28Z

Improve Online Sales by Integrating Single Page Checkout, Custom Shipping Zones and Other Store Management Features Such as Support for iPhone Order Processing

SYDNEY, Australia -- Interspire, the global leader in e-commerce, content management and email marketing software, today announced availability of Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5. The newest version of the Interspire private label e-commerce software is the perfect option for businesses searching for a simple way to build and manage an online store with the intrinsic ability to increase conversion rates.

While there are many ecommerce software options, the problem is that they are difficult to use and are often hard to customize without help from a web designer. Retailers find that few programs offer key functionality for running an online business. For example, they do not integrate with marketing tools or provide business intelligence so that business owners can improve their offering.

"A variety of industry analysts in the ecommerce space advocate improving personalization, offering secure buying options and providing quick transactions to turn visitors into customers," said Eddie Machaalani, CEO and co-founder of Interspire. "Etailers need intuitive products that can impact conversion rates. Interspire products wrap all the features and options needed into one package so our customers can get up and running quickly and sell more."

Ra-ajax, New Ajax Library By The Creator Of Gaia

2008-09-03T20:00:45Z

Thomas Hansen the creator of Gaia Ajax Widgets have recently announced that he is no longer with Gaiaware and already started a new ASP.NET Ajax library Ra-Ajax and a new company Ra Software AS. Thomas have quit Gaiaware due to disagreeing on the future of the company with the others, you can read his very long blog post on the current situation.

Ra-Ajax his new Ajax library is under LGPL 3 license is an ultra lightweight, slick and small Ajax library for ASP.NET and Mono which tries to completely abstract away JavaScript from the developer. It's true that the library is new, but its size zip-compressed already exceed the 7Mo ! The website provide some good samples including Event system, Effects, Dynamic Controls, Button, Checkbox, DropDownList, Image, Labels, Panel, TextBox, Accordion, Calendar, InPlaceEdit, RichEdit, Timer ... and more. More information and download at http://ra-ajax.org/.

Ajax Multi-Player Blackjack Game

2008-09-03T19:26:16Z

AWC Blackjack is a multi-player blackjack game under development but currently available for testers to give feedback and help improving the game. The back-end game server is entirely written in PHP, and the front-end is pure AJAX. Only about 33K to download at the moment (excluding graphics).

The game doesn't use any JavaScript framework so I think there is a lot to do in addition to some graphic design work. But the demo plays great for blackjack fans. Tested with FF 1.5 and later on winxp, FF2 on Linux and IE6,7 winxp.

4D releases 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2

2008-08-01T10:28:40Z

4D have recently released a new version of their Ajax Framework, included in this new release a major enhancement with HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe Air support, In addition to support codeless generation of an Ajax client for the iPhone. Below the press release :

Major release features the world's first Flex-to-Database direct connectivity, iPhone 2.0, HTML 5, Google Gears and Adobe AIR Support

July 24, 2008 - SAN JOSE, CA - 4D, Inc., maker of an integrated software platform that simplifies the process of developing and deploying business applications, announced today the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D Ajax Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to easily harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

"With the advent of technologies like Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) both Flex-powered and Ajax-driven, the iPhone, Adobe AIR, HTML 5, and Google Gears, web applications are making their way to more mobile devices, desktops and, yes, browsers than ever before,"said Laurent Ribardière, President and founder of 4D.

4D for Flex provides the world's first Flex-to-database direct connectivity. All other Flex-to-database solutions require complicated, overweight middleware solutions. 4D for Flex offers a simple, integrated Flex-to-SQL database direct connection. With zero overhead, 4D for Flex not only provides a revolutionarily simple, integrated architecture, but also high-performance connectivity to 4D Server v11 SQL and other industry standard SQL databases.

Object Oriented JavaScript book released and Sample chapter

2008-07-24T13:14:51Z

Packt publishing have recently released a new and interesting JavaScript book that teaches users how to create scalable and reusable JavaScript applications and libraries using the concepts of object-oriented programming. Written by Yahoo! Web developer Stoyan Stefanov, Beginning Object-Oriented JavaScript will teach users to solve web development problems using smart JavaScript. Ajax Magazine readers can download the sample chapter (PDF 872Ko) to have an idea on what the book is all about.

For years, JavaScript has been a handy hacker's tool for adding interactive elements to web pages, now it can be used to build large libraries, multi-tier application architectures, and advanced logic. With these new applications of JavaScript, you need a new way to learn and write it. This book treats JavaScript as a serious object-oriented language. It shows how to build robust, maintainable, and powerful JavaScript libraries, applications, and classes as well as cover many of the recent JavaScript innovations such as AJAX, JSON, and interesting design and coding patterns.

Going Green (and increasing profitability) using SaaS and AJAX RIA

2008-06-26T22:33:37Z

Catalyst Resources released a "green audit" of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaborative workspace project that allows distributed business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. The AJAX Rich Internet Application (RIA) enabled Catalyst Resources to reduce its carbon impact footprint by 21,000 lbs of CO2 per month, while simultaneously reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%.

Since 2002 Catalyst Resources has evolved and enhanced their secure online collaboration, project management and document sharing solution for use by remote employees and select clients. Recently Catalyst began to track how the web collaboration solution impacted the company's greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the need for air travel and local commuting.

"When we ran the analysis, we were pleased with by the significant reduction in our own carbon footprint." said Paul Giurata, Managing Partner of Catalyst Resources. "The question then became how we could broaden the green impact, by expanding the solution from an internal resource, into a customizable team space to be used by our entire client base."

News from Javeline: backbutton support, and Docking Windows

2008-06-19T18:19:44Z

Ruben Daniels have written two interesting articles about outlining new functionality of Javeline PlatForm. With the release of version 0.98.2, PlatForm has enhanced backbutton support. In combination with state objects it implements backbutton support by encoding all state data in the hash.

The second article on Docking Windows in the browser - the kind of new feature that you won't see anywhere else. It allows you to create UI's similar to Aptana or Visual Studio, with windows that can be docked, undocked etc.

BeSlimed, BeJewelled with Mootools

2008-06-05T18:54:02Z

For more gaming fun with JavaScript, BeSlimed is a very interesting Mootools implementation of BeJewelled game - my favorite game on my mobile ! Now you can enjoy it on browser too.

jQuery 1.2.6, Events 100% faster

2008-06-05T18:20:32Z

John have just announced jQuery 1.2.6, a bugfixes releases with major improvements and many new features. Key performance improvements include 103% Faster Event Handling, 13% faster CSS selectors, 21% faster .offset() and 25% faster .css(). New features and major changes in jQuery 1.2.6 :

The Dimension plugin by Brandon Aaron is now part of the jQuery core.
.attr() method has been completely overhauled
.toggle() can now accept more functions
unbind bound .toggle() and .one() functions
.index() supports jQuery collections
jQuery.makeArray can convert ANYTHING to an array.
beforeSend can cancel Ajax calls
Exposed Speeds

More information and download from jQuery.com