I’ve recently been developing a web-based application (a RIA one might say) and, after initially trying to get it working right in jQuery, I decided to have a go at using ExtJS, a JavaScript library I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Basically, it is a JavaScript library that includes a ton of things for building web application other libraries don’t – not surprising considering it started life as an add-on to YUI. Here is my initial impressions of it, most of which are direct comparisons to jQuery.
I recently discovered eXtplorer, which is a Javascript and PHP file manager. The system looks very impressive and the feature list sounds great for allowing less technical users to manage their own websites (rather than requiring an FTP program). However, from my admittedly brief examination of the software I found that many of the things simply didn’t work or there were enough minor issues to make using it rather annoying.
If you’ve ever wanted web application programming to be a little more like desktop application programming then have a look at Sun’s experimental Lively Kernel project.
YUI Compressor version 2.2.1 has been released. Go forth and minify!
I added a very simple mod today that you might have noticed – there is now some text added dynamically to the search box that should give a better indication as to what that area is for.
Stylesheets and script files can often get quite large. Although they will be cached by the browser there is still the time delay (and bandwidth hit) of the first loading, which according to Yahoo! is more often than you think. Here’s a quick and dirty method of using PHP with gzip compression to send your CSS, Javascript and whatever else compressed to browsers.