Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Apollo enables developers to create applications that combine the benefits of web applications – network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach – with the strengths of desktop applications – application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.

This alpha version of the Apollo runtime provides developers with the opportunity to begin building applications for Apollo.  Future releases will provide more stability, more desktop integration, and enhanced support for Ajax developers.

The Apollo Developer SDK, sample applications, and Apollo documentation provide everything a developer needs to start building applications. There are also technical articles, developer videos, and sample applications located throughout the Labs site.

New Features

The release (March 1st) of the AJAX Control Toolkit includes two new controls (ListSearch and SlideShow), a number of fixes identified as important by the community, and three significant enhancements: localization support, automatic JavaScript comment stripping, and ASP.NET theme/skin support. It continues to target the new ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 release.

(more…)

The mad(in a good way) scientists at Yahoo! UI are at it again to learn more about optimizing web page performance. In part 3, they examine the impact of cookies on overall response time. The “takeaways” from this latest installment are:

1. Eliminate unnecessary cookies.
2. Keep cookie sizes as low as possible to minimize the impact on the user response time.
3. Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level so that other sub-domains are not affected.
4. Set an Expires date appropriately. An earlier Expires date or none removes the cookie sooner, improving the user response time.

They also remarked that there was no considerable difference in cookie sizes across browsers and that it would be interesting to further investigate whether there is a difference in performance across browsers.

Something else that I wasn’t aware of is that there is an actual difference in the maximum cookie size depending on the browser:

“The maximum size of a cookie is 5051 bytes in IE 6.0 and 4096 bytes in Firefox 1.5.”

Another excellent read. If you haven’t already, take a look at the previous two parts in the performance research series:

1. Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
2. Part 2: Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!

swfIF is a nice drop in library for adding effects to your images including round corners, rotating an image and applying a drop shadow.

Dustin Diaz has written a post on the pattern technique called currying. For those of you not familiar with currying, it’s basically the transformation of an input into a new function. Dustin’s opinion is that:

[currying]…leads to clever programming. It is also one of the places in JavaScript where functional programming wins over object oriented practices.

Eric Hebert at degreetutor.com has written a nice article for those of you that are newbies or veterans to web development. His 115 resources for the web developer include recommended tools, books, and web resources to help get your next project done right. Be sure to check his Ajax Tutorials resource as well :)

A nice tutorial from webdesignfromscratch.com outlines 15 steps for making a great design for a web 2.0 site. There are plenty of eye candy examples and links to tutorials on how to create some of the eye-catching bold and simple designs you see on successful sites.

Great news from the official Google blog.

“Google Apps grows up” and starts to charge for an enhanced version of what they initially called Google Apps for your domain. New features for the “Premier Edition” include:

• Free until April 30th, 2007 (then $50/user acount/year)
• 10GB mailboxes
• User account provisioning
• Single sign-on
• Email gateway
• Email whitelist
• No ads displayed on Google services
• Access to Google partners

I’ve been using the original Google Apps for domains for several months and love the value it provides. Apparently, there was also an upgrade of the control panel too, doesn’t it look perty?

Today the Yahoo! UI Library just got a little bigger with the addition of some “beta” components including:

1. Button Control - “provides a platform for implementing visually impactful buttons that range from standard click-to-navigate buttons to radio buttons and checkboxes to advanced split-buttons that can operate as both a button and a menu.”
2. Browser History Manager - “supports all A-Grade browsers in managing the back/forward button navigation and bookmarking for dynamic web pages.”
3. DataTable Control - “allows you to present tabular data and allow your user to engage that presentation by modifying/enhancing the data, sorting and searching through it, and adjusting the presentation itself (by, for example, changing column widths). DataTable’s debut featureset includes:”
   • Progressive enhancement: DataTable is built on the foundation of HTML table element markup, providing a solid progressive-enhancement path.
   • Nested column headers
   • Custom sort functions
   • XHR data sources: Integration with Connection Manager offers robust support for pulling in off-page data.
   • Inline editing: Contents of cells can be editable, allowing users to update the information they’re reviewing.

Other changes with this release are the reorganization of utility classes, the YAHOO Global Object, and the YAHOO_config global.

The new versioning has to do with merging an internal library which “were identical, the way we built and distributed them was different and we managed those differences with separate versioning tracks.”

developerWorks has been cranking out the Ajax-related articles this week. Here’s another one by Leons Petrazickis labeled a practical case study.

Follow this case study for quickly creating an elegant, responsive Web application using IBM® DB2® 9 for Linux®, UNIX®, and Windows®, XQuery, PHP, and the Dojo Javascript Framework. The case study is based on IOD Planner 2006, a Web application that was used for the IBM Information On Demand 2006 Global Conference. Learn the advantages of the Ajax approach and see, step by step, how to implement this kind of application.