Direct from Web 2.0

OpenAjax Publishes Future Browser Feature Wish List Results

July 17, 2008 – 6:57 am by coachwei

What does the Ajax community want from future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers have done amazing things with Ajax for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of Ajax runtime environments matters more than ever today. In late 2007, OpenAjax Alliance formed Runtime Task Force (http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Runtime) to address this community concern. The goal is to collect, articulate, and prioritize key issues from the Ajax community, and communicate them to browser vendors. This will help educate the community in large, help browser vendors better plan for their product roadmap, and help developers better use Ajax. There are other great rich Web UI technology initiatives such as W3C’s HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. The OpenAjax browser wish list is not intended to compete with these initiatives, but instead complements them by capturing and communicating ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 2 Comments »

Time to Vote - Ajax Feature Wish List

June 23, 2008 – 9:14 am by coachwei

What would you like to see in the next generation of browsers? Can you help to make the web a slightly better place than where it is today? Various people from the Ajax community have put together a good list of feature requests (a total of over 40), collected at OpenAjax Runtime Task Force . Now it is time for everyone to cast your vote! Voting is easy. Just sign up at OpenAjax Wiki . Then go to the voting page , select the priority number from a dropdown box for features that you care. -That's it. Your results will be calculated and displayed in immediately. Once you select a priority item from the dropdown box, your selection is immediately sent to the server and recorded int the database. A nice use case of the asynchronous feature of Ajax. Of course, you can always come back and make changes. (Thanks Jon ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 1 Comment »

Fix for WordPress TinyMCE Editor Problem

June 19, 2008 – 5:17 pm by coachwei

If the visual editor (TinyMCE) in your newly installed Wordpress is not showing up, this maybe a solution to your problem. First, Make Sure your visual editor is turned on. In the Wordpress admin, up in the upper right corner, click on your user name, and then make sure “Use the visual editor when writing” is checked. Open a tab or window in a browser, and go to [your site]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php - if you don't get a screen full of garbage and errors here, this post is not for you. You have a different problem. If you do see a lot of garbage from the above url, it most likely mean that there is a compression related problem with your tinyMCE javascript file. The actual compression is done on the server by a file [wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php]. This file will compress the tinymce.js files (over 200kB) using gzip and save the compression result to [wp-content/uploads/js_cache] ...more »

Posted in Tips | 1 Comment »

GoogleAppEngine -Not Delivering On the Promise So Far

April 8, 2008 – 3:36 am by coachwei

If you haven't heard of it yet, Google launched something called "Google App Engine", a complete stack for deploying and hosting web applications that leverages Google infrastucture for scalability and reliability. It "sorta" competes against Amazon's EC2. The "infrastructure as a service" trend is fascinating. In general, I've been studying the best ways to host and deploy services in a web environment - Amazon EC2 has come up in my mind many times. And of course, Google App Engine certainly caught my attention. It also caught the attention of our friends at Techcrunch. They built a fairly simple app, deployed it to Google, and blogged about it. I enjoyed their blog. And then I went to check out the application. Here is what I got: What? Well, maybe it's just alpha, but it certainly doesn't look like high availability at this moment. Update: just saw a posting that reported Google AppEngine has been ...more »

Posted in google | 1 Comment »

Announcing a $50K Venture Fund With Microsoft

April 1, 2008 – 2:41 pm by coachwei

This is a little premature, but the deal is done. Following the core tenets that I believe this venture fund should operate, I'm "un-announcing" a $50K fund with Microsoft here in a web 2.0 way. The official PR/press will follow in the next month or so, pending the clearance of a few regulatory matters. What Is It: Razorspeed Partners. Razorspeed is a new kind of venture fund that focuses on investing in "small and immature ideas",with locations in US and China only. The limited partner is Microsoft. Going forward, we may open up to allow other corporations to participate. What Does It Do: Unlike any other venture fund out there, Razorspeed is different: Razorspeed focuses on "small ideas" and "immature ideas", though we will accept "immature and big ideas" too. Razorspeed focuses on bright teams that have high hopes, but may not have "experiences"; Razorspeed's main deal flow comes from a semi-annual ...more »

Posted in humor, software business model, web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Will Rich Internet Become Rich Man’s Internet?

March 31, 2008 – 3:51 pm by coachwei

The Web is one of the most important technological as well as social/cultural developments in our life. Its global impact is rooted in its openness and its capability to evolve on a democratic basis. However, I have concerns. I'm concerned about the significant corporate interests driving towards "unweb". Not to pick on video, but to use video as an example. Video, the most recent hotspot on the web, largely relies on Adobe's Flash technology. Not that Flash is not good. On the contrast, it is well designed and implemented as a technology. It enabled the possibility of Internet Video and we should be thankful. However, it is a platform controlled by a single entity (Adobe). We should trust our future in the collective will of the society instead of the goodwill of a benevolent dictator. Another example, the area that I've dedicated ten years of my life to, Rich Internet ...more »

Posted in web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

OpenAjax F2F Meeting at NYC

March 24, 2008 – 4:22 pm by coachwei

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called "Runtime Advocacy Task Force" at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a "wish list" from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues(http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki/Main_Page), of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting. The discussions around Ajax Runtime wish list (http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki/Main_Page) were fantastic. Douglas Crockford from Yahoo, Jon Ferraiolo (IBM and OpenAjax), Howard Weingram(Tibco), Gideon Lee(OpenSpot), Dylan Schiemann,(Sitepen and Dojo), Alex Russell (Dojo), Bertrand Roy (Microsoft), Yehuda Katz(jQuery) etc all contributed great deal to the ...more »

Posted in WebDev | No Comments »

Possible Solutions to Web Security Issues

March 11, 2008 – 8:05 pm by coachwei

The “Same Origin Policy” is at the core of browser’s security model. Under the “Same Origin Policy”, a web resource can only interact with another web resource if and only if both resources are from the same origin. However, “Cross site scripting” and “cookie” both brings security challenges in this security model. “Cross site scripting” However, there is a notable exception to this rule. The “Same Origin Policy” does not apply to scripts and thus enables something typically called “cross site scripting (XSS)”. With XSS, a web page from one origin can contain a script element from a different origin. More importantly, this “foreign script” element has full access to everything else on this web page. Namely, the cross-domain script runs with the same authority as scripts from the originating domain. As a result, XSS can be intentionally or unintentionally exploited for security breaches. “Cookie” All browsers support “cookie” which ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 1 Comment »

A Study of Ajax Performance Issues

January 22, 2008 – 11:28 am by coachwei

Introduction: Ajax application performance largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. I've heard various people saying various things about Ajax performance. Some people say JavaScript is just too slow. Some people say that the problem is not JavaScript but rather Browser DOM being too slow. Some people would then argue that browser DOM operations are fine. The problem is Internet Explorer that is unbelievably slow. What is the reality? Having heard enough but haven’t seen enough data to clearly justify one argument against the other ones, I decided to take some time and do some study in this area. The Study: Using the work produced by Robert Buffone at http://www.rockstarapps.com and a 2GB RAM/1.66GHz Dual CPU Windows XP machine, a JavaScript performance study is conducted. The results are shown in Appendix 1 : 1. Vertically, in each column, Appendix 1 shows how a ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 3 Comments »

The Common Culture Root of Web 2.0 and Barack Obama

January 8, 2008 – 7:39 pm by coachwei

What is the reason for this Obama phenomenon? Why is it happening right now, at this moment of history? Is it because of his eloquent speeches? Is it because people in this country are so tired of the current reality that they want to depart from it as far as possible? Is it because of some of the strategic mistakes that Hillary made? As a web 2.0 guy who blogs on “Direct from Web 2.0” , I did not see this coming. In fact, my preferences are Mitt Romney from the republican side (maybe McCain too) and Hillary Clinton from the democrat side. I think the three of them (Mitt Romney, John McCain and Hillary Clinton) will do better in the oval office than other candidates. Just like how venture capitalists pick CEOs for their portfolio companies, I put “experience” and “track record of execution” very high in my assessment. If you ...more »

Posted in politics, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Programmatic DOM Node Manipulation on IE

January 2, 2008 – 7:01 am by coachwei

Programmatic DOM node manipulation is actually not straightforward, given that Internet Explorer has so many unique DOM behaviors. I ran into quite a few issues recently when I was playing with Dojo Toolkit . I didn’t find a thorough answer to my questions when going through Dojo source code (Pardon my ignorance here. I am very sure that Dojo folks have run into these issues before and have solved them. It is just my stupidity of not being able to find the answers via source code reading). Further, I was surprised that I couldn’t find a lot of information about this on the web either. Hence this blog entry is created as a note to whoever is interested in programmatic DOM on Internet Explorer. Let’s take a really simple example. Let’s say that you want to programmatically create an HTML DOM node, and programmatically set its attributes. The value of these ...more »

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The Misleading Business vs. Technology Argument - Tips for Startups

December 21, 2007 – 5:20 pm by coachwei

In this high tech industry, one of the most misunderstood and potentially misleading conventional wisdom about startups is the separation of "business side" and "technical side" and "technical people should listen to the business people". This is the teaching from almost every business school textbook: don't lead with technology, instead, should lead with business. You should look at things from a business perspective, not from a technology perspective. Yes, I agree that the above is right and makes sense. But such teachings can be misleading, especially since that the other side of this argument is not mentioned enough. In particular, the evolution of this high tech industry is making such teachings more and more dangerous if not taught from a balanced perspective. The reality is that our society has been tinted by the side effects of such teachings. All these well publicized examples of how various companies failed for being technology-centric or ...more »

Posted in Tips, software business model | No Comments »

Is This a Little Too Much Hacking for Prototype.js?

November 21, 2007 – 9:20 am by coachwei

Prototype.js is a popular Ajax toolkit for web developers. I have enjoyed using it despite the complains I heard from people about how Prototype.js does too much JavaScript hacking that breaks other people's code. One of the common one complains is that Prototype.js adds methods to built-in JavaScript objects (such as String object). I tend to brush such complains aside - "well, there is nothing wrong per se by adding some methods to JavaScript objects via standard permitted means". But this recent incident with my adoption of the latest and greatest Prototype.js 1.6 really made me wonder: is this a little too much hack for Prototype.js? Or is it just bad coding practice? I built a little application using Prototype and Scriptaculous. The application was fairly straightforward and Prototype+Scriptaculous made building such an application fairly easy too. Well, then. I used a JavaScript compression tool to compress the JavaScript files. ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 6 Comments »

Low Level Ajax Coding GotCha

November 17, 2007 – 5:45 am by coachwei

People say Ajax is hard...and this may be why. I spent some time playing with Bob Buffone's newest work on Ajax over the last few days. Bob built an xModify processor that runs on either jQuery, Dojo or Mootools. The xModify processor is powerful but quite lightweight (10KB without gzip). There will be more news on xModify but that is not the point of this post. Anyway, I wrote a little app that uses his stuff. The entire application uses three JavaScript file: jQuery library (70KB), xModify processor (10KB) and my little JavaScript file (2KB). My target is to run the little app on Internet Explorer and FireFox. In particular, I have used FireBug on FireFox during development. FireBug is a popular FireFox browser add-on that provides JavaScript debugging capability. After a little while, without a lot of effort (thanks to FireBug, jQuery and xModify), my app is working. It ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 5 Comments »

Building a WebSite Using Java?

November 6, 2007 – 8:00 pm by coachwei

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me. The other reason that I ponder this question is that the power of Java is a perfect fit for the areas where websites may need more than markups or scripting, such as ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 11 Comments »