Ajaxus place on the net

This is Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week. It is about web application security issues and possible solutions.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Today just released GWT 1.4RC with more than 150 bugfixes, in addition to many new features and improvements. JavaScript produced with GWT 1.4 is about 10-20% smaller, but the most interesting that it’s becoming much more faster. Most important change in GWT 1.4 is ImageBundle, which make it easy to collapse dozens of images into a single permanently-cacheable image file, another new feature that will boost GWT performance.

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GWT Home

Google has just released a preview of Mapplets, essentially gadgets for their maps. In practical terms it allows me to see Google trends on a map, check local gas prices, consume georss feeds, or see a heatmap visualization of Zuerich Travel times.

They can be found at http://maps.google.com/preview. You can find about 30 Mapplets to add via their content directory.

So what are Mapplets? Google explains:

Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.

They have also proposed some changes to KML and ATOM that would support attribution to authors and a return URL for the content hosters. Right now. You can see an example here.

This is making Google Maps a mashup platform, but they know that they don’t want to be the only data provider or the only mashup. That’s why the attribution is so important. Most mashups are fighting to be found. Google is now providing them yet another way to do that.

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he Slide Show is a simple to use application of the Google AJAX Feed API that is designed to let you add photo slide shows to your pages, sites, and blogs. The slide show control takes photo feeds from all popular sites, such as PhotoBucket, Flickr, and Picasa Web Albums. Any feeds that use Media RSS can be used without customization. However, the slide show control allows any photo-based feed to be accomodated, such as iTunes feeds similar to those found in the Tune Bar solution or the custom feed example below.

The Slide Show control is highly customizable, allowing you to specify options such as the number of photos to display, display and transition time between photos, how the photos link back to their source, etc.

Adding the Slide Show to your page is a snap. The easiest way is to start with our sample “hello world” sample. If you want to tweak the code even further, we have a complete Slide Show Programming Guide available for you to learn from.

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Yesterday a new class had been added to Google AJAX Feed API. Its designed to allow you to more easily add a collection of feeds to your pages. The FeedControl is pretty simple:

“var feedControl = new google.feeds.FeedControl();
feedControl.addFeed(”http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml”, “Digg”);
feedControl.addFeed(”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch”, “TechCrunch”);
feedControl.draw(document.getElementById(”feedControl”));“

In addition to the formal documentation, they have put together a few samples to help you quickly come up to speed.

• Basic FeedControl - feedcontrol.html
• Tabbed FeedControl - tabbed.html
• Sidebar Style FeedControl - sidebar.html
• AJAX Feed API Playground Blog

Yesturdayat the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen unveiled the new version of Google Analytics. They would be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks.

What’s different?
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.

The admin settings and the actual data collected are not changing except for a few improvements detailed on this FAQ page, so it shouldn’t take you long to get used to the new interface. We hope that you’ll find Google Analytics more accessible and useful for your business or site. Here are some of the improvements:

* Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
* Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
* Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
* Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

Why did we develop this new version?
Since Google Analytics launched in November 2005, the demand for website analytics has increased significantly. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics customers, and web analytics has moved from being a niche function to becoming a mainstream aspect of the business for companies of all sizes. You’ve asked that we focus our engineering efforts around maintaining the sophistication and features that experienced users want, while also making it easy for both experts and non-experts to quickly and easily find the answers you want.

For a smooth transition, here are a few helpful resources specific to the new version:

* Take a tour of the new version
* Report Finder Tool: will help you see where data from the previous interface is located within the new version (it is also linked to from within your reports on the left navigation menu)
* FAQs for more details about the new version
* New version features page

Here is a list of useful links:
Google Analytics Blog
Interesting opinion

Google keeps providning us with great services everyday. Today lets have a look at newly released AJAX Feed API. According to Mark Lucovsky from Google you can: “mash up feeds using only a few lines of JavaScript rather than dealing with complex server-side proxies”

JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest use the Same-Origin Policy (SOP). With this policy, scripts can access data from the same host from which the containing page of HTML was served, but not other hosts. This protects users from certain classes of scripting attacks, but prevents many developers from writing AJAX-based mashups. The Google AJAX Feed API offers a simple workaround to these restrictions for a specific type of content available on the web: syndication feeds.

The AJAX Feed API can return feeds in two formats: JSON and XML. By default, the API returns the feed in the JSON format.

The AJAX Feed API JSON format is an abbreviated, canonicalized version of the original feed. It maps Atom and RSS attributes like title, description, and summary to a set of common JSON properties so that you can access Atom and RSS feeds uniformly. For example, the JSON result format returns RSS attribute description as the JSON property content, just like Atom. Likewise, the RSS element pubDate is returned as the JSON property publishedDate to make the results uniform with Atom feeds. The JSON result format is useful if you only want to access standard RSS and Atom elements, and you don’t want to worry about the differences between feed formats.

Links related to the topic:

- Combined JSON/XML Result Format
- Google AJAX Feed API Developer Guide
- AJAX Tune Bar

I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and ‘pages’ features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done. Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just emailed my way. And actually Dan is uniquely qualified to discuss this, as before becoming CEO of Pageflakes in January this year he was head of MyYahoo. Here is what he said:

“The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today’s users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others.”

What it comes down to is that Yahoo obviously has a huge store of content and Web properties it can utilize in its personalized homepage. Whereas Pageflakes is one of the ‘little guys’ (along with slightly bigger little guy Netvibes), so its strengths and opportunities will be in opening up its platform and encouraging use of content from all over the Web.

A few nice updates to the Personalized Homepage this week for those who are feeling too lazy to customize it. If for instance you’re feeling lazy about browsing for new content to add to your homepage, there’s a new feature that will give you item-to-item recommendations. For my part, I have the Digg gadget on my page. If I click on the gadget’s drop-down menu and select “You might also like…” I’ll get a bunch of stuff that other people who like Digg also liked, including Slashdot, Wired News, Macworld, and more.

For those who are too lazy to create new tabs to organize stuff, here’s a bit of magic. If you add a new tab to your homepage, you can name your tab and have the option of letting us select the content for you based on your chosen name. Say I create a tab called “Astronomy” to get the latest news and info on that topic. We’ll populate the page with the NASA image of the day, the current moon phase, and a bunch of feeds related to astronomy. Less lazy folks are welcome to try to stump us with tab names.

And if you just don’t know what you want, we’ve added ratings and reviews to our directory, so you can see what other people have to say before committing to a new gadget.

Google is, by a country mile, the most popular search engine in the world. It’s popular because it seems to rank pages so accurately and quickly, time and time again. The secret to its success is its top secret Page Rank Algorithm. Google developed its page ranking system in an effort to increase the quality of search results and has left all of its competitors for dead. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) gurus are always looking to find new ways to increase their Google rankings. As we all know, a website is a pretty nifty thing to have for a myriad of different reasons. But the truth is that it’s worth is derived from the people that surf it, and if no one is surfing it, then it becomes useless. So who’s the biggest website referrer? The answer is Google in almost every case.
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