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Ajaxian has its predictions up for 2007 and I like just about everything they have on it.

It’s the time of year to be posting random predictions for 2007. Here are 2007 Ajax predictions from Dion and myself, please post your own in the comments.

Dion predicts:

• Ajax beats AJAX in all but bad newspapers.
• Someone tries to coin Ajax 2.0.
• A large amount of apps have flash AND ajax, and users don’t know or care.
• Many frameworks consilidate or die.
• A widget api means componts can run on many frameworks using one api.
• Ajax wpf/e interop.
• Dashboards become front boards.
• More desktop apps get written with javascript.

Michael predicts:

• 2005 was the year that developers learned all about Ajax and by 2006 everyone else in the industry had caught up. In 2007, is is mainstream users who become acutely aware of the trend towards rich applications inside the browser, and discover that even word-processors and spreadsheets - along with a wide array of workplace applications - can be webified. At the same time, users remain oblivious - and rightly so - to the underlying technologies that power them.
• The boundaries of Ajax harden, with most developers gaining a clear understanding of what it can and can’t do with modern browsers and managers in a better position to decide on application architecture (whether to use Ajax, Flash, desktop, etc.).
• More attention on Ajax accessibility due to some government report or court case.
• Google Office. Finally!
• Backlash against Google Office as managers learn that their data must be hosted externally in order to use it. Pressure from bloggers and some analysts to make an Office appliance that can live behind the firewall, but it’s not happening in 2007.
• The advertising and media communities finally become aware that page view metrics are no longer the only way, but generally treat it as a problem and fail to see that the situation is actually better than before.
• Several fringe technologies heat up as developers notice they are already being used in some applications and learn how to apply them: HTTP Streaming (Comet), Virtual Workspace (Live Scrolling - never-ending scrollbars), Cross-Domain JSON (along with JSONP, JSON APIs, JSONRequest, and a general lack of awareness about the JSON security issues), Unique URLs (bookmarkability/back button), Lazy Registration (personalized functionality before formal signup). Comet in particular … it may be 8 or 9 years old, but it’s big news in 2007.
• Other fringe technologies grow, but remain, well, fringe. Such as Host-Proof Hosting and applications involving offline storage.
• With its excellent documentation and pattern language integration, the Yahoo UI library becomes the standard weapon of choice among mainstream developers seeking a pure Javascript framework. In the Java world, GWT makes great strides as the platform becomes richer and design patterns emerge.
• Mobile web development continues to suck.
• Javascript increasingly recognised as the world’s most popular “second language” and becomes popular as a lingua franca to describe generic programming concepts. Several attempts at server-side Javascript frameworks.
• IE7 causes more than a few headaches.
• Firebug is installed by pretty much any developer using Firefox.
• CSS is back, baby! Echoing the recent mass adoption of Javascript, developers who previously had a fleeting familiarity with CSS now become fluent practitioners.

Best wishes for 2007, however you play your Ajax!

powered by performancing firefox

Via ajaxian, here’s yet another example of an existing product that owns the market (evite) being threatened by a site that offers the same product where the only real difference is the interface. See also Google Maps vs. Yahoo, Gmail vs. yahoo, etc.

I was talking to a VC that recently said they had heard from four companies that want to do a “better evite”. That isn’t a high bar (ads in your face all over, not even showing dates in order!) but they have been slow coming.

Renkoo is a contender, and they have a very Ajax rich side to them, implemented with Dojo, and a splash of Comet.

Now that Renkoo is out there as a public beta, give it a twirl. One walk through creating a new invite will show you some very rich work, with forms filling out as you use each section, and then minimizing to get out of your way.

Google has released its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the Mac. Version 1.2 now works on OS X as well as Linux and Windows.

I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t really attest to its capabilities. Basically, though, it allows you to write and debug AJAX web apps in Java and compile them to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

As they phrase it on their site, GWT “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.”

There’s also a Google Web Toolkit blog where you can follow the Toolkit’s development progress.

PS> This is my first post to Clientside since it went public to the world, so I thought that I should, like Aaron, also throw out a “hello world.”

I’m Mark Bult, an Art Director at CNET Networks, currently working on redesigns of Webshots.com, UrbanBaby.com, and Consumating.com, three of CNET’s community and lifestyle properties.

I also blog about Mac and graphic design stuff (and personal stuff, so you’ve been warned that a lot of it’s boring) at enews.org.

Greetings all,

This is the first official post of this blog open to the public. For those of you who don’t work at CNET, the scoop is that we’ve had this blog up for internal use for most of the year. After a bit of debate we decided that we’re doing things here that might be useful to others and decided to turn this thing on for the outside world.

This blog is mostly maintained and posted to by me - Aaron Newton. I’m a Product Manager at CNET for our “Redball” family of sites: News.com, CNET.com, and Download.com, and my roll here is rather broad, but as far as anyone reading this is concerned, I’m one of our Javascript/Ajax evangelists (yes, I’m stealing that title from Bill Scott).

This blog is focused on clientside technologies, mostly javascript but you’ll find some css and flash stuff here, too. I tend to rip off Ajaxian a lot, reposting here what they’ve posted with my own opinion. This blog is set up to email people when I post (I’m considering using feedburner), so a bunch of our developers subscribe. They don’t always have the time to go dig around on the internets for this stuff, so by reposting it here it goes out to them. If you’d like to get an email when I post, just drop your email address in the form over at the top of the nav.

Expect to see new stuff in the Library and Examples sections later this week.

-a.n.

via ajaxian, and the video is totally worth the watch.

Scrybe is an on-line organiser that looks too good to be true, and some are dying to try.

Some core features are:

• Offline Support: Go to “work offline” and it just works? It even synchronizers up when you get online again.
• Context: It knows the context it is in.
• Timezones: Easy to change timezones, and create secondary time zones.
• List Transfer: Copy from excel and paste into the web app.
• Jump Context: Drop todos onto calendar dates.
• Thought Pad: Rich editing. Copy and paste directly from web pages.
• Sync: paper isn’t evil, so support it. | Read the rest »

Justin Palmer is shedding more light on Prototype updates.

This time around he covers events and DOM traversal:

Events

In days past bind was great at accepting additional arguments, however, bindAsEventListener didn’t get this love until now. We can pass those additional arguments to bindAsEventListener with ease:

var Clicker = Class.create();
Clicker.prototype = {
initialize: function(link) {
Event.observe(link, ‘click’, this.onClick.bindAsEventListener(this, ‘red’));
},onClick: function(event, color) {
Event.element(event).setStyle({color: color});
Event.stop(event);
}
}

new Clicker(‘cool’);

DOM made simple

We all hate the DOM, so how about some simpler methods to traverse it?

$(‘menu’).up();
$(‘menu’).down()
$(‘menu’).next()
$(‘menu’).previous()
$(‘menu’).down(2) // grab second arg
$(‘menu’).down(‘li’, 0)
$(’sidebar’).descendants()
$(’selected’).previousSiblings()
$(‘actions’).ancestors()
$(‘actions’).siblings()

And it looks like documentation is in the works:

On the documentation front: We have something in the works. We have the API about 80% documented and will have this up for public consumption as soon as we can. This will start off as very basic API docs, but we plan on putting a lot of effort in this as time goes by. On that note, you can send your thanks to Andrew Dupont considering he has worked very hard on the docs.

Well crap. 1) I love the mad4milk guys (makers of moo.fx, moo.ajax, moo.dom, prototype.lite). 2) their new framework looks AWESOME. 3) as always, their libraries are SUPER TINY.

But damn, now I have to learn something new, and maybe rewrite a bunch of crap. This is the problem with javascript. Still, when Prototype + Scriptaculous is 100K, you gotta admire their ability to crank something out in under 20K that will get you nearly the same thing.

The Mad4Milk team (the minds that brought the world moo.fx) have unleashed a brand new, very impressive Javascript library out onto the web - MooTools.

mootools is a very compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework. Its unique design makes it extremely crossbrowser, easy to use, and a snap to extend with your own code. It comes with a choice of more than fifteen scripts, plugins and addons, including Effects (moo.fx) Ajax (moo.ajax), Dom Navigator (moo.dom), Drag and Drop, Sortable lists, cookies Manager and many more.

There aren’t any demos of the functionality quite yet (as of the date of this post), but you can download the first release of thise powerful little tool.

You can also check out what Jonathan Snook has to say about it, having already downloaded and worked with it a bit. He’s also created a simple tutorial on using the new library to create a drag-and-drop example.

A few months ago I had Bill Scott from Yahoo come talk to people here at CNET about Designing for Ajax. One of the things that he and I talked about before his talk was how the competative landscape for Yahoo has changed dramatically in the last year or two. Take Yahoo Maps. This application was pretty much unchanged for several years and it’s only competitor was Map Quest who had, in most ways, the same application. Along comes Google and makes a killer map application, but what changed here? The maps are still the same, right? The interface is the new battlefield. | Read the rest »

I always get a sinking feeling when Prototype starts to change. Sam (who maintains the project) is checking fixes for the next release today and Justin Palmer (encytemedia.com) is posting things that he’s seeing get checked in as it happens. On the one hand, the next version offers some nice improvements (thus far, there may be even more changes to come), but on the other, it’s stuff I’ve got to go dig into and incorporate into my work…

via ajaxian:
Justin Palmer has updated us with a bunch of recent Prototype updates including:

• Chainability: A bunch of methods now return their first arg so we can change together methods

  $('sidebar').addClassName('selected').show();
  $('sweet').observe('click', function(e) {
      console.log("%s was clicked", Event.element(e));
  }).setStyle({color: 'red'});

• Form and Form.Element methods mixed in to $ and $$
• Shorter syntax for Event Observing:
  $('element').observe('click', function(e) { alert(e); });
• Backwards Compatability: Element.toggle, Element.show, and Element.hide no longer take an arbitrary number of arguments
• Add serialization and observation support for input type=search
• Simulate non-GET/POST requests by POSTing with a _method parameter set to the actual verb
• Make Element.update() handle TABLE-related elements with the DOM API because of IE’s missing .innerHTML property on them
• and many more.

via ajaxian:

Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 3 just came out into the wild. This gives us a glimpse into new features that we will be getting.

The big item is Client-side session and persistent storage meaning that we will be able to use JavaScript to:

There are also other nice features such as microsummary support, anti-phishing, and inline spellchecking.