Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:
Nice modals| Jeremy K. | check out the demo at http://okonet.ru/projects/modalbox/ |
pretty nice modals built with prototype + scriptaculous |
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| Ryan S. | that modal demo is cool |
i like how it slides down from the top, OS X-style |
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| Jeremy K. | yeah, feels more like an interstitial |
but maybe that’s just the mac culture burned into me :) |
Web apps game changer?
| Jason F. | |
| Sam S. | JF: that basically amounts to cookies that can store more data |
I really don’t think it’ll be a “game changer” |
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but we’ll see ;) |
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| Ryan S. | BUT THE WEB IS THE NEW PLATFORM |
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| Mark I. | If you want to give up Rails and write all your apps in Javascript maybe. |
I don’t like Javascript that much. :) |
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| Jamis B. | just need a new framework |
“Javascript on Jails” :) |
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| Sam S. | jails is right |
that’s what writing a web app in js would feel like |
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| Ryan S. | aren’t google apps written in JS? |
do they generate the JS with magic or something? |
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| Sam S. | from what I understand, the client-side stuff is written in a Java framework that generates JS code |
| Jamis B. | guh, that’s even worse |
| Sam S. | at least for gmail |
Popular Science
| Mark I. |
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I was flipping through the February 2007 Popular Science when I saw the Backpack Calendar in the corner of the page. |
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| Ryan S. | oh how cool |
| Jason F. | Woah on the BP Cal! |
| Ryan S. |  |
| Mark I. | I enjoy Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. |
| Jason F. | MI agree—great pubs |
Squid Gates
| Ryan S. | wow really bizarre marketing from microsoft in asia |
also gates is looking more and more like a squid monster |
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| Jason F. | LOLOL |
37signals wrote this on Feb 21 2007 There are 17 comments.
Carl 21 Feb 07
Nice to see that backpack calendar is getting some press. I just wish their was a yahoo! widget that let me access it like the rest of backpack.
Peter Cooper 21 Feb 07
TrimJunction is a ‘clone’ of Rails using JavaScript.
Freja is a RESTful MVC framework for JavaScript (though it’s not Rails-y). It’s pretty cool but it’s very XML and XSL -y.
Frankie Frisch 21 Feb 07
Why is generating JavaScript code from Java bad? Gmail is awesome and Google typically makes pretty good technology decisions.
Dan Evans 21 Feb 07
Regarding the web as a platform and javascript frameworks. I had been using prototype + scriptaculous to code little bits of animation and effects into sites. I began telling designers that if they could come up with cool animations that they would usually put into flash they should run them by me first and I could probably just do them in scriptaculous. After a couple of attempts I hit a wall with scriptaculous, and ended up backing off.
More recently I found jquery. I have been loving it. It does everything that I wanted/needed scriptaculous to do for me. It stands out from other javascript frameworks to me because writing in other ones feels like an add-on to javascript while jqeury feels like a completely new beast. Converting my old scriptaculous scripts I had multiple methods that got rewritten into a single line in some cases. And the footprint for the library itself is much smaller as well. (20k)
I am wondering if you guys have tried it out and what some of your opinions on it are. To me, it seems like a step closer to a javascript framework that could really provide an arena in which everyone treats the web as an app.
brad 21 Feb 07
Billy the Squid, har har!
Jeff 21 Feb 07
I know no one around here would ever give Microsoft credit, but the script library written for ASP .NET AJAX (which works stand alone) is lighter weight and more rich than Prototype. And when you use it in the context of ASP .NET AJAX server controls, it’s ripe with all kinds of ass kickery that requires little more than a little C# code.
My point is that, as with Java, serving up the right script from decisions on the back end is a really good idea that makes life easier for developers.
Josh 21 Feb 07
LOL at Squid Gates. But that’s actually quite tame as far as weird Microsoft marketing goes. In fact, other than the name, I don’t really see much odd about that other than some experimental flash design (like the annoying reorganizing photo clock thing).
You want to see truly odd Microsoft marketing, then you have to look at http://www.clearification.com/ ... that makes no frickin’ sense what-so-ever.
Tristan Juricek 21 Feb 07
jQuery has saved the last two projects I have been working on. The projects were web clients based on non-web friendly frameworks: on one project, the HTML sent to the browser was an order of magnitude larger than what I actually needed. Having an xpath+css selection capability was absolutely killer, and actually changed the way I think about using JavaScript. All of my own code shrunk to less than half of its original size.
Not all of jQuery’s plugin libraries are as robust as I would like, but neither are its competitors.
Interestingly, Yehuda Katz has done a bit of work on jQuery+rails. Not quite there, but with my prior experience, jQ would be a welcome library for writing extensions in nearly any back-end language.
Timichango 22 Feb 07
The wallmount computer is nifty, but can’t be done with some laptops that don’t support a 180deg. splay of the screen/chassis, eg ibooks, macbooks, some PC laptops, etc. It’s all in the hinge design… although, I suppost that for this application you could simply dismantle the hinge…
Ben 22 Feb 07
Yeah, like writing to-do lists is soooooo hard on the client side.
Oooh, a checkbox, how am I gonna make that hide the text next to it when I click it? Damn this ill conceived Javascript!
Tim 22 Feb 07
The MSFT lib for Ajax is an abomination, and completely overcooks the fundamental language overrides. Even compressed, it’s over 85k to run. :(
Frank 22 Feb 07
What in the world happened to the Campfire “Files & Transcripts” page? The layout is confusing.
To make matters worse, I am constantly receiving “Application Error” messages while I’m using Campfire tonight.
Seth Aldridge 22 Feb 07
I’m no billionaire, but I’d imagine that if I were I’d find a way to avoid nerd hair. It just goes to show you that you can’t buy class…you can buy everything else just not class :)
Jeff 22 Feb 07
Tim: You’re not even close to being right. The compressed scripts in ASP .NET AJAX , assuming you use the entire library, weight 32k. What’s “overcooked” about it?
Tim 22 Feb 07
Jeff: I stand corrected, as I reverified both the uncompressed and compressed scripts (compressed being GZIP ), and it’s way past my original 85k estimate. Here are the numbers on why Ajax.ASP.Net is Pure Evil &tm;:
These examples are literally the ‘SimpleService’ examples up on their website right now. It’s one method call, and that’s it.
Compressed: 20k – post-back crap 23k – WebForms crap 7.5 k – WebForms 23k – MSFT ‘Framework’ crap 1.75k – To support the service
Uncompressed: You only need to see one or two to get the idea: 113k+ -> MSFT Framework 30k – WebForms (the small one above)
The size alone makes this a non-starter. If you actually analyzed the framework, there’s so much redundancy in there, I’m shocked anyone can use the thing.
Jens 22 Feb 07
I dont know, AJAX , javascript effects… sliding down, up, left and right… I dont know, it still looks very ‘cheap’ and nineties.
Its like, “wow, look at me, i slide!!!” It doesn’t even slide smoothly. The only real good and practical use of this hype is the xmlhttprequest as implemented so nicely by GMail.
Jeff 26 Feb 07
You’re still not getting it. The parts you’re talking about assume you intend to integrate with existing server-side ASP .NET functionality. You don’t need to do it that way. Your “analysis” only shows you don’t know how to use it, and your anecdotal and unsupported “examples” don’t prove anything.
This discussion is closed.