classical geek

When I’m not talking/writing/teaching Ajax, I’m often found practising it at Historic Futures, in idyllic rural Gloucestershire (that’s in the UK).

We’re looking - rather unsuccessfully, at the moment - for someone to fill a gap in our team, to complement our existing technical skills with a bit of graphical flair. The usual channels are drawing a blank so far, so here’s the job spec. If you know anyone who would like to work with us (or better yet, you want to yourself!), then drop us a line at designjob at historicfutures dot com.

For the Prototype & Scriptaculous book, I wrote an interactive interpreter or ’scratchpad’, to allow easy visualisation of non-visual language features. This came in useful especially in the Prototype sections (chapters 8-10), in which objects, functions & closures, and arrays get a good workout.

It occurred to me a little while ago that I could re-use this to allow readers to experiment with code snippets that I wrote on my blog. It’s live now, and the blog is officially powered by Prototype & Scriptaculous! Here’s a quick demo to illustrate the Scriptaculous Effect.toggle() mechanism. Every time you run the code, the red square will either fade in or fade out.

Here’s a simple variation, showing how Effect.toggle() can take a second argument that defines an altrenate pair of effects to toggle between - in this case BlindUp and BlindDown.

To run either listing interactively, just click the blue arrow button next to it. Two panels will appear, a text entry field on the left, and the output window on the right. Click the blue arrow in the toolbar of the text entry to run the code (and feel free to edit it, and play around a bit).

When your favourite programming toolset is announced dead twice in a week, you know it must be in good shape!

First up, Microsoft announced Silverlight, a .NET ‘n’ XAML based presentation system that runs across browsers, and even on Macs. And Miguel’s already announced a port for Linux. The second Ajax killer of the week is Sun’s JavaFX, a Java runtime-based scripting language with a declarative (a la XAML) and procedural flavour. Both very nice, and you can see the advantage of having a huge existing ecosystem of code to plug into.

After a cursory glance at the demos (and we all know how much a cursory glance is worth), I couldn’t help feeling that familiar sickening lurch that Sun has shot itself in the foot again over presentation (or maybe my toothache was just playing up). The silverlight demos look kind of modern and with it, all hyper-shiny vector graphics and rounded rectangles. The JavaFX tutorial presents a set of examples that look like, erm, Swing apps (without wishing to be too rude about them). Admittedly, a few other demos, such as the moto website clone, do a better job of jazzing things up, but Silverlight’s grabbed first place in the shiny baubles stake, I reckon.

Now, Java2D can go head to head with the other presentation technologies of the day, no problem. Way back in 2004, Oyoaha had an experimental Java2D look and feel for Swing that could hold it’s own against the latest crop of Silverlight shiny goodness (see the small screenshot on the JavaLobby page, if your eyesight is good), although all that remains of the demo now is a cheeky 404 page. Look’s like oyoaha’s moved on from the lucrative world of Swing L&F’s. Oh well.

So, please, please, pretty please, OpenJFX team, consider shipping JavaFX with a fancy 2D L&F. It’s superficial and crass, I know, but so are we developers.

May the best Ajax Killer win! In the meantime, I’ll keep giving you cursory glances, and keep honing my JavaScript!

My Ajax training course, run in connection with Skillsmatter is getting a major revamp this June (as opposed to the continual minor revamps that have been going on since day one as new stuff keeps appearing in the Ajax landscape). In addition to the Core Javascript & DOM and Core Ajax courses, we’ll be offering a new one-day immersion in my favourite JS libraries, Prototype & Scriptaculous. For more details, click the banner below.