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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released today. There are several cool UI enhancements that this beta brings to the table that I won't cover in this post, but you can learn more about them on the IEBlog. Instead, I want to talk about how beta 2 affects IE's relationship to web standards.

First, CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Standards Mode:

Also known as 'Dynamic Properties', CSS expressions are a proprietary extension to CSS with a high performance cost. As of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS expressions are not supported in IE8 standards mode. They are still supported in IE7 Strict mode and Quirks mode for backward compatibility.

In case you don't know, CSS expressions were actual bits of JavaScript that you could run from CSS rules; this was commonly used to simulate the CSS max-width property for IE:

IE 8 beta 2 also now supports alternate style sheets:

Internet Explorer 8 now supports alternative style sheets as specified by HTML4 and CSS2.1. The alternative styles that are defined by the Web page author is available through the Style menu under the Page menu. The styles are also available through the Style menu under the View menu. The No Style option on either menu can be used to disable all authors styling.

In terms of the Known Issues with IE 8 Beta 2, the first is related to Ajax bookmarking and back button support and using window.location.hash to do cross-domain communication:

Internet Explorer 8 create entries in the travel log and back button for each instance of window.location.hash that is set. This is part of the behavior for Internet Explorer 8 AJAX Navigation. If you use this technique to communicate between documents, we recommend that you switch to the Internet Explorer 8 Cross Document Messaging feature that is based on Section 6.4 of the HTML 5.0 specification.

Finally, there are some issues with the onload event for IE's XDomainRequest object that helps with cross-domain communication:

The onload event may not fire reliably. We recommend you use the onprogress events which continues to fire as the data is received.

Unfortunately this is it for this release. You can see the full Beta 2 release notes, or download it yourself.

On a related note, IE 8 Beta 2 includes cross-site scripting attack (XSS) protection:

The XSS Filter operates as an IE8 component with visibility into all requests / responses flowing through the browser. When the filter discovers likely XSS in a cross-site request, it identifies and neuters the attack if it is replayed in the server’s response. Users are not presented with questions they are unable to answer – IE simply blocks the malicious script from executing.

Finally, PPK has also published a post on IE 8 Beta 2 and its changes.

I start with an aside; This must be the most un-Adobe website I have ever seen. Below is the entire website for the Open Screen Project:

As the site says, the details are in the press release which says:

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment -- taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment is intended to provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

The cool part of all of this, is the fact that the old restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications are now in the past. The restrictions used to say that if you read the SWF spec, you couldn't build something that would run SWF files. So, could build an editor, a tool, but not a runtime in anyway.

This has just changed by:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

With news of OpenJDK coming at JavaOne next week, we will see changes with the most deployed runtimes out there. Just the beginning of the path towards an open source Flash.

I keep thinking of the JVM playing FLV/SWF, and the Flash player grokking .class files!

There is something cool about being able to write an Ajax app on an embedable device.

The people behind BarracudaDrive have released a free version of the BarracudaDrive Ajax application server for the Linksys NSLU2 and the Unslung Linux firmware.

Developers can customize and write their own applications by using the integrated scripting language Lua Server Pages, which is based on the super fast scripting language Lua. The server includes its own integrated database engine, thus making it possible to create configuration less database powered applications such as the CMS. The server also includes the Bindows Ajax framework.

The integrated scripting language Lua Server Pages (LSP) is similar to how ASP and PHP works. BarracudaDrive LSP applications are deployed as standard ZIP files. The ZIP files, which are in the "applications" sub directory are loaded and mounted as read only file systems by the web server. The server can also load "non deployed" applications. The "non deployed" Lua Server Pages (LSP) are compiled on demand just like PHP and ASP pages are compiled.

While this is not strictly Ajax or JavaScript related, it is noteworthy to point out that Sitepoint just released a HTML reference that is quite handy to have around if you wonder if what you are building is really HTML or just tagsoup.

Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are just listings, like W3schools.com or terribly outdated. Sitepoint have done quite a good job in listing all the HTML elements and categorizing them into different use cases. There is also a list of deprecated elements and attributes to avoid (which could be considered dangerous to still bring up as some of them are too handy to simply add to solve an issue) and a Microformats primer.

We know for a fact that other portals/article sites are working on similar projects and consider it a really good way of flushing old and outdated tutorials on things as simple but important as markup out of the search engine result pages.

The reference also gives a legend of browser support, something that so so far was only available on the German SelfHTML reference.

Jonathan Snook will be conducting a live chat tomorrow (3/5/08) at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT) via UStream. Here are the details:

• Location: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/snookca
• Date/Time: 3/5/08 at 10:00am EST (15:00 GMT)
• Topic: Q&A relating to Jonathan's development work with Adobe AIR, and questions regarding JavaScript, frameworks (PHP or JavaScript), or about freelancing.

This is definitely a good opportunity to pick the brain of one of the top professionals around.

The Pownce team has been working hard to get their API up to speed and have gotten the API to a point where some cool applications can be built from it. Yesterday, they announced v2.0 of the Pownce API:

We’re sorry it took so long for us to release a complete API. We’ve taken great care to provide the best experience for developers and we hope the wait was worth it. Going forward, we’ll be working hard to keep Pownce the best social messaging application out there.

Well worth the wait, new features include:

• Ability to post notes
• Ability to post messages, links, files, events and replies
• Ability to fetch lists of private and friends-only notes.
• Integration of OAuth token-based web authentication.

This should open the doors for building new custom Pownce clients and applications similar to what’s been done with Twitter.

In addition, the Pownce team has created a new application directory to showcase applications built by developers.

Documentation for Pownce API v2.0 can be found here: http://pownce.pbwiki.com/API+Documentation2-0

Continuing their march into the RIA space, Adobe announced today the official release of AIR v1.0 and Flex 3.0.

Adobe has taken the beta off of the wrapper as their have released both AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0.

As Ajax developers, Adobe is trying hard to get us developing applications, not just Flash folks. They have a place for us to start with AIR:

The new Adobe AIR runtime enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy on the desktop. AIR applications run across operating systems on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.

Adobe AIR

The AIR runtime and SDK has gone through an especially long beta cycle (since June 2007) to ensure that both security and compatibility with existing frameworks was achieved. Some key new and/or updated features include:

• Enhanced Desktop Fucntionality: Drag and drop to the operating system, copy and paste between applications, launching of AIR applications from the desktop or the browser, and run in the background with notifications.
• Data Access: Adobe AIR now provides both synchronous and asynchronous access to the local file system, as well as structured data within a local database. This database is implemented using the open source SQLite database.
• JS Library Support: Most major Ajax frameworks can be used to build AIR applications. Supported frameworks include jQuery, Ext JS, Dojo, and Spry. Adobe AIR integrates JavaScript and ActionScript to allow cross-scripting between the two languages, and integrated rendering of Flash and HTML content.
• Security: Applications built on Adobe AIR can only be installed through a trustworthy install process that verifies that the application is signed via industry standard certificates, providing users with information about the source and capabilities of the application.

Flex 3.0

Adobe's Flash-based RIA development platform, Flex, continues to mature and has been picking up steam in both the corporate space as well as sites such as blist and Scrapblog who have embraced Flex whole-heartedly. Some of the new features in Flex 3.0 include:

• Intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of user interface layout
• New capabilities for creating RIAs and building applications on Adobe AIR
• Integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 3 making it easy for designers and developers to work together more efficiently.
• New testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.

One of the most compelling parts of the Flex announcement is the fact that Adobe has released the Flex SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License.

Adobe Open Source Site Launch

Finally, Adobe announced the launch of their new Adobe Open Source site which aims to "presents the definitive view into open source activities at Adobe, including details regarding projects that Adobe participates in and hosts."

The new...website is designed to keep you up to date on Adobe open source activities, within Adobe as well as with the larger world. It will also be the point of entry to our source code contributions, including Flex, BlazeDS and others. We'll post news items, tell you where to see us, and keep you in touch with some of our favorite bloggers.

Currently, the site houses the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and Tamarin projects, all of which have been open-sourced by Adobe.

Aptana has coordinated the release of their AIR plugin that includes support for Jaxer which allows you to write AIR apps that run on the desktop that include server-side code, written in JS, that can run on your backend server.

Adobe also put together a list of featured applications that you can check out.

Hitting a "1.0" release is a big deal (as is a 1.0.1 ;), so congratulations to the entire Air team. Adobe is working hard to raise the bar in the RIA space by giving developers more tools with great functionality. 2008 is panning out to be an interesting year in web development.

Ben and I are at Adobe Engage today, and hope to find out more about Adobes plans in the coming year. We are live twittering using the #engage hash tag.

To end with something a little fun, and since it was the Oscars tonight:

NOTE: Rey and I both wrote a post on this big release. This post is a conjoining of both posts into one

The Yahoo User Interface library is now almost 2 years old and the team is getting ready to celebrate with a party on the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California.

If you’re around on 26th of February, why not drop by for the celebrations, meeting the people behind and get some inside information about what the future holds for the YUI. Apart from that, there’ll be the obligatory food and beers and of course some schwag to take away. Space is currently limited to 150 people, so be quick if you want to come.

You can find out more about the party on the YUI blog and sign up for the party on upcoming.

Being a Londoner, how can I not mention a pub night that relates to Ajax technology!

Brent Ashley has created the first Ajax Pub Nite for Monday January 14th in Toronto.

Hopefully this is the first pub nite of many. If anyone is up for a Bay Area Ajaxian pub crawl let me know.

Flash (via Flex or AIR) allows developers to open connections to servers (binary sockets), much like XHR in Web applications. And, just as frameworks like DWR and JSON RPC allow for remoting objects via XHR, a number of frameworks allow for remoting objects in Flex. One of the most popular has been Flex LiveCycle Data Services, but it's also a commercial product with a big enough price tag to cause many developers to steer clear.

Not anymore.

Adobe just announced that they are open-sourcing the remoting and HTTP messaging features of Flex LiveCycle Data Sources in a new product called Blaze DS, which will be LGPL licensed. In addition, they are taking a page from Comet and making it easy to create a persistent connection for "server push" functionality for the HTTP messaging. The "data management" features (i.e., keeping a client and server model in sync) remain payware.

In addition, they are publishing the spec to their object remoting protocol (AMF), making it easy for others in the community to create remoting servers (previously, folks had to reverse-engineer the protocol). This opens the door for other non-Java platforms to provide middle tiers in the Flex stack (i.e., Flex doesn't include any public database drivers, so you have to write a middle-tier to transfer data to Flex apps, and right now Java is the only first-class option).

Many folks wonder why Ajax developers don't just use Flash; as Adobe open-sources more and more of their stack, it's going to be very interesting to see the reaction of the community. We at Ajaxian aren't in the "Open Web or Else" crowd, but a fully open Flash stack would sure make the world a touch more interesting.

I am really excited to post this piece of news, as I genuinely like everyone involved. At the last Ajax Experience, Alex Russell and Joe Walker gave a joint keynote. At one point it was going to be slightly different, but this news hadn't been totally completed so it was held off (having to start a UK company, blah blah).

The news is that DWR has joined the Dojo Foundation. This is all thanks to SitePen, which Joe Walker has joined (technically, he has joined the UK Ltd etc).

I am excited to see what will come out of a closer collaboration. Ben recently had to implement a dashboard that needed to tie in to backend Java code, and DWR was a breeze and handled everything for him, including batching, which meant that only a few larger transactions were occurring instead of millions of little calls.

Anyway, back to the news:

“SitePen has experienced significant growth this year and we’re well
aware of the amazing talent and opportunity that will open up by
expanding in the UK, and all of Europe for that matter,” said SitePen
CEO, Dylan Schiemann. “Having a developer as talented as Joe Walker
join SitePen and head up our UK operations is an amazing win for SitePen
and its clients, who will now have access to even more valuable
expertise with DWR and related technologies.”

DWR is an important open source library for Ajax and Java developers
because it simplifies development of applications based on Ajax, Reverse
Ajax, and Comet techniques. DWR will become part of the Dojo
Foundation, home of the Dojo Toolkit, Cometd and OpenRecord projects.
All Dojo Foundation projects exist separately, preserving flexibility
and choice for the varying development communities.

“SitePen is an extremely forward-thinking company that understands the
tremendous value of open source and I’m excited to be a part of it,”
said Joe Walker. “Donating DWR to the Dojo Foundation will allow for
increased adoption and a stable environment in a great organization.”

“Development teams, both small and large, have quickly discovered the
benefits of using DWR in conjunction with leading Ajax libraries like
Dojo, TIBCO General Interface, Scriptaculous, and others. "DWR joining
the Dojo Foundation is a great win for the DWR community," said Kevin
Hakman, director, TIBCO Software, Inc. who has been a corporate sponsor
of DWR's development for more than a year. "The close alignment of these
projects, and the anticipated integration points between them, will
serve to further simplify creating Ajax applications for Java developers."

A huge congrats to Joe, Dylan, Alex, and the rest of the teams.

We have seen the betas and the release candidates. Now we see the final release of Ext 2.0. Major congratulations to Jack, Rey, and the entire Ext community.

The Ext team is proud to announce that the official release of Ext v2.0 is available for download. This new version of the Ext framework is the culmination of many long hours of work and dedication by the Ext Core team as well as our community of testers and supporters. Ext 2.0 is a dramatic step forward from all previous versions of Ext, providing increased performance, ease of configurations, flexibility and UI capabilities.

We've also made learning how to use Ext much easier with a completely revamped document center and expanded & better organized samples. All of this without a significant library size increase in this new version.

New Features

The Ext framework has always been praised for it's attractive UI components and top-notch foundation. It was important that Ext 2.0 carry on the reputation of providing a great base to build upon while incorporating new features that are unique to the Ext 2.0 framework. These include:

Grouping & Group Summary

Ext 2.0 introduces highly configurable single-level column grouping capabilities as well as summary rollups at the group level. These two additions are critical in decision support (DSS) and report intensive applications. Important to note is that Ext’s grid sorting functionality continues to work as expected, sorting data within each group set as opposed to sorting the whole grid.

Scrolling Tabs

The new Ext 2.0 scrolling tabs are truly amazing and provide for a much more flexible UI then traditional static-based tabs. I think Jack says it best:

Call me crazy, but I can sit, click and play with these tabs all day.

The tab metaphor is synonymous, from a UX perspective, with segmenting unique sections of data with the context of a page. With increased demand for data presentation via tabs, without the reciprocal increase in screen real estate, the team took a step back and decided to rethink the way that tab controls should function. The approach was to allow as many tabs as necessary to be created and display them within a scrolling metaphor. By extending the Ext.TabPanel control with a new “autoScroll” directive, all tabs added to the panel instantly fall into the scrollable behavior of the tab panel:

Anchor Layout

A common theme in desktop applications is the ability for form fields to be anchored to fit the size of their container. Unfortunately, HTML & CSS don’t easily lend themselves to this type of behavior, throwing off form element positions unless carefully crafted styles are created. Even with that, inconsistencies across browsers forces even further hacks to be developed to ensure that form elements remained positioned as expected.

Column Tree

In Ext 2.0, one thing we've focused on is providing examples of customizing Ext UI components. The example below demonstrates how easily the Ext tree panel can be customized to add support for columns in the nodes. A prime example of an application the could benefit from this would be a project planner as demonstrated below:

New API Documentation Center

We wanted to make traversing the Ext API as simple as possible and that prompted a substantive revamp of our document center. The new version continues to make use of the intuitive treeview metaphor but great expands on this by taking advantage of the new scrolling tabs feature being introduced in Ext 2.0. By selecting a specific API topic on the tree, a new tab will appear allowing developers to maintain multiple API documents open at one time instead of being limited to only one page at a time. A new search feature has also been added which acts to filter down the treeview based on a keyword entered into the search field.

New 2.0 Documentation

The Ext Team has been hard at work creating documentation for the 2.0 release. We now have several documents for new and existing Ext users that should come in very handy during the transition to 2.0.

Introduction to Ext

If you are brand new to Ext, you should start with our original tutorial, the Introduction to Ext. This tutorial was created for the original 1.0 release, but has been newly updated for 2.0. This is a great place to start if you've never written any code in Ext.
Ext 2.0 Overview
The Ext 2.0 Overview is primarily intended for those with some prior experience with Ext, as it dives into some advanced topics. However, it is a great place to start for anyone just getting their feet wet with 2.0. This overview provides an introduction to all of the major new areas within 2.0 including:

• The new Component Model that underlies all major components
• The new Container and Layout Models that provide the visual and structural framework for Ext
• Updates and new features for the Grid component
• The new XTemplate and DataView classes for template processing and data-bound UIs

Ext 1.x to 2.0 Migration Guide

Existing 1.x users should be happy to see the 1.x to 2.0 Migration Guide. Unfortunately, with changes of the magnitude made in 2.0, it was not possible to maintain complete backwards compatibility to 1.x. However, we have taken great pains to ensure that the upgrade path is as seamless as possible. This guide provides an extremely detailed overview of every breaking change between 1.x and 2.0, including comprehensive explanations of how and why each area changed. It also includes detailed API comparisons between classes when appropriate.

New 2.0 Samples

Prior to this release, the demos for Ext were consolidated into the API viewer making it cumbersome to differentiate what was a demo and what was part of the API document viewer. We have now detached the demos and organized them onto a standalone page. The applications are also grouped into specific subsections to allow Ext developers to drill down into applications that show specific Ext functionality.