The Day Today

My flatmate (and twice contributor to TheDayToday) has started his own tech blog focusing on web development. He started it in January with some sort of encouragement from his employer - it’s refreshing that companies are acknowledging the existence of weblogs, and the benefits they can have to their staff’s development. Of course there’s also the cynical view that it’s a way to spy on your staff, but I think there’s a responsibility to the blogger to remain somewhat anonymous and to also set some boundaries before you begin writing - don’t dig your own grave! Anyway, he’s got some handy tips and best practices as well as news and reviews. Check it out here.

I finally got my hands on an iPod Touch the other week and one of the more interesting things I have come across is a variety web based applications appearing designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Facebook was one of the first applications to utilise this feature basically creating stripped down pages with Ajax functionality to give the appearance of an application. Most of the functionality is still in Facebook for the iPhone, except thankfully the custom applications.

Since then Apple have created a web application portal at http://www.apple.com/webapps/ and new applications are appearing everyday - some incredibly impressive considering they are completely reliant on HTML and JavaScript.

For anyone interested in developing their own web applications, Apple have released a very informative developer guide. I’m going to have a go at developing an application in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll let you know how I get on!

Additional: Further to my post last week about JavaScript frameworks, I’ve since found this useful tool, called SlickSpeed, developed by the makers of MooTools showing the performance between the main frameworks. The tool runs tests on each framework to see which is faster under different tasks and you can then select the framework you wish to use depending on the advantages you need.

Hi I’m Andi and I’m going to be writing some web design/development focussed entries on The Day Today.

As a self-taught web developer I used to write a lot of my own JavaScript functionality, which meant when creating websites the limits were my own and everything needed to be heavily tested on multiple browsers. For a commercial website these days this potentially means testing on Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 and 7; as well as the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox; Opera, Safari and Camino.

Recently, I’ve discovered that there are some great object orientated JavaScript frameworks out there which take away the pain of lower-level JavaScript coding and leave you to play with the fun stuff. These frameworks allow you to apply some nice Web 2.0 effects such as slides, appear, AJAX, accordians, drap and drop, resize and fade, and they have already been tested in all the major browsers (degrading gracefully where they do not work).

There are lots of frameworks available on the Internet, but two of the more successful ones are MooTools and Script.aculo.us. I personally have more experience with MooTools, but I hear Scriptaculous is very good too (generally it is considered bad practice to mix the two in one solution). Microsoft have tried to jump on the bandwagon too, offering a AJAX framework for .NET 2.0 (formely known as Atlas) which is quite good, if a little too buggy at the moment.

If anyone knows of any other frameworks that they have found a particular joy to work with, please let me know below!