How to provide feedback:

• Submit a bug to the jQuery bug tracker (you will need to create an account, first).
• Be sure to include a simple test case for any problem that you’re experiencing (either attach the test case or provide a link).
• Mention that you’re testing “jQuery 1.3 Beta 2″ (otherwise your ticket will get confused with another release).
• Email a link to your test case and bug report to the jQuery Dev list so that the dev team will be notified about your issue.

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jQuery 1.3 Beta 2

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Twitter Tweets Weekly Updates for 2009-01-04

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Two years ago I made the somewhat immodest claim that 2007 would be the “Year of jQuery.” Since then, jQuery’s popularity has grown in ways that none of the core contributors could have imagined. Now I’m ready to make another bold pronouncement: 2009 will be the year of jQuery UI. Here’s why:

Read the full story at Learning jQuery

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2009 is the Year of jQuery UI

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News in jQuery UI 1.6

• New classes for error, highlight and disabled states
• Extended, sprite-based ThemeRoller icon set
• Class system for adding rounded corners via CSS (Firefox and Webkit, gracefully degrades)
• New ThemeRoller tool with inspector style view
• Theme gallery with voting and user-generated themes
• Improved documentation for generating custom themes and using the class framework

News in jQuery 1.3

• Selector Engine (Sizzle)
• DOM Manipulation rewrite
• Event Namespaces
• Event Triggering

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jQuery UI, ThemeRoller and jQuery 1.3

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Mobile Web

iPhone and the Android platform have changed the way people interact and expects of web based services the last year. We wrote a post about how iPhone and Android will change the web earlier this year and with Firefox as mobile browser coming up, we know that 2008 was the year mobile web, finally after a lot of years, made it to the crowd and online services.

Mature JavaScript Libraries

2008 saw no or very small happenings in the JavaScript library world. We saw a lot of great implementations on top of the big libraries but nothing revolutionary. The big things coming as I see it are jQuery 1.3, YUI 3 and hopefully someone who dares to take the libraries to a new abstraction level without bloating the experience of using the framework/library. One framework that have been good at promoting its name the last year is Dojo. I believe 2009 can be interesting when it comes to JavaScript as developers who traditionally only developed back-end solutions will move over to write more front-end solutions as the online libraries, services and tools are growing in numbers.

CSS Frameworks

No one likes CSS. Except the guys and girls who distribute and maintain CSS frameworks. One really good thing with 2008 was that we saw that CSS frameworks such as BlueprintCSS, YUI, YAML, Boilerplate and 960 grew in numbers and more people started using them. The higher abstraction level the easier to focus on the right things instead of things such as browser bugs etc. What are the next step? I believe we will see more interaction pattern based components that combine CSS, JavaScript and Markup and solves problem under the hood, graceful degraded, unobtrusive, SEO-friendly and better than you as a single developer can build them.

Bubblish

2008 was the year we saw strange services pop up each and every day, and you asked your self the question: “OK, I know the Internets are big and that, but who wants a micro-blogging-video-on-demand-service for chihuahuas?”. Together with the financial crisis and venture capitalists that start to think one more time before throwing money at someone faster than they can say “twitterish” we have moved into something that looks more and more like the dotcom-bubble 2000-2001. The big difference now compared to then is that now we actually have websites who earn money, and hopefully some people will still have a job to go to in late 2009.

Platforms and Tools

Not all platforms and APIs was released 2008, but this was the year we actually started using the platforms, tools and APIs out there. LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and Google all opened up new ways to retrieve and manipulate data as third party developers. In 2009 we will laugh at services who do not expose a platform or API. It will look as stupid as not having a mobile front-end.

Google App Engine

Google launched Google App Engine in April 2008 and the main thing with it was the possibility to host and run you web application in the big Google Cloud. This opens up for the developer to easily build big scalable web apps. I believe we will see more of this in 2009.

Google Chrome

The Google Chrome Strategy is interesting and not fully understood yet, but years of discussion about the Gbrowser and Google pushing for Firefox ended in Google releasing Chrome. Chrome is not available for Mac and Linux yet, but built on WebKit and with an extremely fast JavaScript engine (V8) it will probably start gaining market share anyway. My personal opinion is that we do not need another browser, I would rather have seen Google going full time into either Firefox or WebKit rather than starting their own branch. In the long run we do not need more browsers.

Authentication Services

Facebook Connect, Friend Connect from Google and OpenID saw their big debut and usage in 2008. Even though OpenID been available for a while, it was just now we saw big use of such services. With 1,000,000 different social networks and other sites where you need to store credentials, the need for such services will only grow stronger over the years to come.

Twitter and FriendFeed

For micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and real mashups, such as FriendFeed, 2008 was the bomb. According to services such as Compete.com these services has grown significant during 2008 and nothing seems to stop them during 2009 (maybe the uptime for Twitter though ;-)). Barack Obama used Twitter (even though I doubt he did it in person) as one important piece of his winning election campaing that sent him to the white house.

Personal Level

• My then-wife-to-be gave birth to our second child in May
• We finally got married in December
• I turned down a really (really, really, amazingly) good job offer
• I was about to build a great new house

Conclusion

2008 was an interesting year with ups and downs, both private and professional. I believe that 2008 finally showed us the web as a web of services where small dedicated services prosper over the ones trying to be a one-stop-shop for anything. The internet is more and more becoming a distributed UNIX-system with specific services doing the thing it does best, and it is up to the user (another service or a person) to do whatever he/she/it needs the system for achieving.

Happy New Year,
Mattias

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2008 in Retrospect

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Twitter Tweets Weekly Updates for 2008-12-28

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http://frontendbook.com/feed/json/?callback=? (content-type:application/json)

Find out more

• Plugin home
• Github
• Readme

Why

• I think JSON is a very powerful way to syndicate content and data
• I think we should not need to write stupid proxies for aggregating feeds via JavaScript
• Opening up your data is a good thing
• I could not find a working example that was a plugin, all solutions I found was hacks in the actual source code of WordPress.

jQuery Example Retrieving JSON

$(function(){
$("body").append('<div id="wp-json">Loading JSON</div>');
$("#wp-json").css({
'position' : 'fixed',
'right' : '0px',
'top' : '0px',
'background' : '#f00'
});
$.getJSON('http://frontendbook.com/feed/json/?callback=?', function(json){
var result = '<ul>';
$.each(json.items, function(){
result += '<li><a href="' + this.link \
+ '">' + this.title + '</a></li>';

})
result += '</ul>';
$("#wp-json").css({
'background' : '#fff'
}).html(result);
});
});

Download

• Download at Github

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WP-JSON - JSON Syndication for your WordPress Blog

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Read more at Web Design Trends: Call To Action Buttons

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Nice Piece on Call To Action Buttons

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Pragmatic, Pragmatic, Pragmatic

OK, now is the time to start being pragmatic when it comes to everything. Roles, tasks, platforms, frameworks, libraries or any other thing that could enable cat-fights in any web department. Ask yourself the question: “Am I a pragmatic person when at work?”. If the answer is Yes, could you be even more pragmatic in even more areas, in order to avoid unecessary (from a business point-of-view) discussions and fights. If your answer is No, start being more pragmatic, put feelings and opinions away and focus on facts, reality and truth. I know a lot of people who say they are pragmatic (everybody wants to be pragmatic) and at the same time say that we must spend 12 man-year on building an almighty architecture that will survive WW III, when business needs here and now could be solved with existing tools or with lesser efforts added to the project. In short: Start being pragmatic in your daily work, and stop saying you are pragmatic.

Focus on Possibilities

Recession opens up for good things. When times are bad, investors and competitors decrease their efforts and that is a possibility. When others are braking, you should increase your efforts in order to gain market shares or enter a market that are ultra-competitive during good times. As long as you are still employed or running your own business getting clients, make sure you invest whatever you can invest making sure that you are increasing your market shares and revenues. This sound easier than it is in real life. But in order to convince you: Apple, Microsoft and businesses such as Online Poker where born during other time of crisis. I am confident we will see new business-leaders born or growing big during the coming years. I am writing a post on what companies I think will go out of recession as winners, will publish it before Christmas. Remember: In bad times, brave people can build the platform for being the next winner.

It Aint Personal

If for some reason someone (your company or lack of clients) puts you in the corner where your job is at risk, or even worse you get sacked or have to shut down business, Do not take it personally, because during times like these even talented people are fired. Often middle-management has to fulfill a number of layoffs and meet some strange budget-requirement making their decisions somewhat numeric instead of human-resource-optimized. Often roles needed for running daily businesses are the ones that are prioritized to keep. If you do not do this right now, you are probably more likely to get sacked than the guy making sure that the SVN-server is up and running. But it aint personal (most of the time at least).

Business Argument not Techie Arguments

I do not like techie arguments when we have good times, and I am pretty sure no business owner likes them at all during bad times. Developers have to be better, in good and bad times, trying to put numbers on their arguments. This is important for two reasons: First, it is easier to convince the business owners with business arguments and second, if developers try to find business arguments instead of tech arguments, they will be better developers as they do understand business better and tech solutions are business driven and not vice verca.

Summary

We will face recession. Your company will adapt to this. Maybe they speed up, maybe they slow down. The important thing to know is that no one is safe but recession is not all bad, it also opens up for new businesses and possibility to enter competitive markets. One good thing to bear in mind during recession, as well as better times, is to try to be more pragmatic and business oriented not only in mind but also in action.

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Recession Reality Check for Web Developers

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We are excited to announce that we have extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when applicable.

We are looking for a good solution for scalable hosting and were thinking of going with Slicehost, but this changes a lot for our project, as we will target both Europe and the US.

A quick view on Pricing, says it is +10% in Europe in comparision to the US. I bet I will write more on this.

Read more

• EC2 Pricing in Europe and US
• TechCrunch on the news

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Amazon EC2 Now Available in Europe

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