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.
OK, so I’ve made some comments about the Madman site in the past but lately I have been getting more and more upset by outages in the service. Right now that has really reached boiling point as I’ve been trying to get to the site for the last 7 hours. Read on for more ranting on the subject, along with some (hopefully) constructive criticism.
Well, I finally got off my arse and fixed the admin area for my blog. For the last couple weeks I haven’t been able to access it because of some interesting errors telling me that Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) … which I thought was odd seeing as I hadn’t changed anything recently and the fact that it failed to allocate 0.2% of the total available and complained of running out of memory. It turned out that my web host had (finally) upgraded to PHP 5.2 which doesn’t actually explain the errors but it makes me feel better than things randomly stopping working.
So I upped the memory limit for PHP to 16Mb and all is now well. I hope.
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.
Songbird, a music player with tight integration with the web, has been released at version 0.3.