Backbase Newsletter - January 2008

Dear ${Demographic.FirstName},

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Backbase newsletter in 2008! We’d love to hear how you like our newsletter, and if you have suggestions for improvement. Please take a couple of minutes to fill out our survey:

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Below you will find a wide range of new articles about Ajax, including updates on Ajax for JSF, browser and HTML news, and much more. Enjoy.

Best regards,
Jouk Pleiter
CEO, Backbase

PS. We still have a couple of spots left in our Backbase Online Training class on Feb 11-13. Use the “jan_discount” code to get an immediate $100 discount on the online training, for a total low price of only $350. Available only to the newsletter readers.

The JSF Edition of Backbase Enterprise Ajax 4.1.2 was launched a couple of weeks ago and contains several new features, such as: easier creation of custom JSF Components; integration of 3rd party JSF components; and integration with server-push. Also, we created several examples pages and refreshed the demos: a chat application and the Duke’s bookstore demo. Read all about this in the ‘What’s new’ article on the BDN.

Mozilla is about to release Firefox 3 beta 3. The new Firefox 3 is faster, more secure, easier to use, more personal and provides an improved platform for developers. The release notes for beta 2 give a good overview of the new features. There’s an interesting discussion on Ajaxian about Cross-Site XHR Security in Firefox 3: this feature will make cross-site communication easier, but possibly introduces security risks.

W3C has just published a Working Draft for HTML 5. HTML 5 is the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. The focus is on new features and interoperability. It will provide a more solid basis for Ajax frameworks. Examples are: more strict parsing rules and more native widgets, such as a datagrid and input elements with more practical attributes (date, number, email, etc.). There is also a document with the changes between version 4 and 5. Once the standard is finalized, it will probably take a couple of years before all four major browsers have fully implemented the new standard.

Due to the increasing demand, we’ve created a new online Backbase training that you can attend behind your computer from anywhere in the world. It’s 3-4 hours per day for 3 days, and you don’t have to travel! The next session starts February 11th: register now, and get $100 off with the coupon code ‘jan_discount’. If you’re a potential partner, contact us for special partner pricing.

O’Reilly recently had a strange problem: their Perl website suddenly redirected to another 4-letter domain starting with a P, featuring content of a totally different nature. Nat Torkington of O’Reilly wrote an article to explain what happened: they’d become victim of an advertising system that requires running remote JavaScript, which was hijacked by the other website. Ajaxian has more discussion about these JavaScript risks. In short: be careful loading JavaScript cross-domain, especially if you don’t control the other domain.

Simon Willison has published an introduction to Comet (HTTP Push) using the Jetty Web server and the Bayeux protocol. He points out that it’s reasonably simple to set up. Backbase also just published a Comet example: a Chat application. This uses DWR and the Backbase JSF Edition. So whenever you have a need to push information from the server to the client, Comet is worth considering.

Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards. This month Microsoft announced that IE8 now supports Acid 2, a major milestone for a web browser that’s mainly known for its many quirks. Also, IE has introduced version targeting to replace unreliable browser detection, causing quite a bit of discussion. Whereas Acid 2 tests HTML and CSS, the newly announced Acid 3 test will test ECMAScript and DOM: that’s essential for easier Ajax development.

The discussion forum on the Backbase Developer Network frequently contains some interesting posts. For example, this post describes how client errors can be captured and sent to the server with the Backbase JSF Edition. It is a technique also used on the debugger. The post shows how to post the client messages to the server for "remote debugging". Of course caution is needed not to overflow the server with posts...so use it wisely.

Backbase partner froglogic has released version 3.3 beta of their Automated Web testing tool Squish. It includes improvements in test synchronization and now supports native browser dialogs and controls. For all changes, see the 'what's new' article. They also have a demo on how to use Squish with Backbase.