Friday, October 31, 2008

Blue



Getting up to the Mediterranean sun out the window of the Pullman Cannes-Mandelieu during the W3C TPAC last week.

Lost and found



All my feeds seem to have disappeared this morning. I had logged out last night in another browser tab, but the error reporting sure made me wonder for a moment whether Google Reader had a Halloween prank up its sleeve.

Boo!

Haunted house poster in New York

We went through a bunch of Halloween attractions this season. The trick to haunted house attractions, ofcourse, is to not increase your awareness by immediately scanning the surroundings in every dark room but to let yourself be surprised.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Happy Diwali

दीपावली की सबको शुभकामनाएं ।

दिवाळीच्या सग्ल्यांना शुभेछा

ਹੈਪੀ ਦੀਵਾਲੀ

દિવાલી મુબારક

শুভো দীপাবলী

தீபாவலிளி நல்வாழ்த்துகக்ள்

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

AJAX as infrastructure

I've been meaning to blog about some of the work being done in the Ubiquity XForms project, and it took Carsten to complain about the amount of JavaScript in web application-level code to finally get me going.

The use of AJAX, not as application-level code, but as an infrastructure upon which to implement the semantics for a much better and standard set of abstractions for authoring Rich Internet Applications is beginning to be demonstrated by the Ubiquity XForms library. As JavaScript engines get 8 vertical cylinders, all that computing power can be put to very good use. The Ubiquity XForms library aims to implement the XForms 1.1 standard and make it available to all current web browsers, desktop and mobile. The set of technologies that XForms provides thereby become available to contribute to a standard rich web backplane.

Existing AJAX libraries such as Dojo and YUI play an important role, they provide the platform that Ubiquity XForms builds upon, in terms of widgets and not so visual bits like submissions and change notifications.

Obviously the library (abbreviated as UX) is open source -- its under Apache License 2.0, and has public developer, contributor and commit mailing lists.

Just coming out of the W3C Technical Plenary last week, UX was mentioned in the session on the 'Future of XML Ecosystem in W3C Client-Side Work' discussion as an interim way to look past some of the distributed extensibility limitations in HTML(5) :-) And speaking of the discussion, it was in my opinion the most well-received discussion in the entire plenary day, in so much as folks didn't mind continuing after a break when polled about it!

Back on topic, while UX is under active development, you can try simple examples right now (though they load excruciatingly slowly over SVN):

http://ubiquity-xforms.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/_samples/

The most important thing ofcourse is the source of the samples, so without a 'View Source' you haven't really seen anything.