langtags.com

I am a fan of NetNewsWire, and since I use multiple computers, I thought it would be nice to use the NewsGator syncing capability. I have used this before, way back when I used the Newsgator Outlook plugin.

I ran into some issues (it had created a bunch of empty folders, which I remember happening a few years ago) and I decided to go to the web-based version to try to clean it up.

Now, this isn't meant to be "pick on newsgator" day, but the entire experience was painful. First, if I selected more than a couple of folders to delete it would take an eternity to do the deletions, and in fact a few times it just timed out. That made me have to go back and de-select a few until it would go through. Extremely frustrating (especially when you are trying to clean up!).

The interface itself consists of the typical tree view on the left, and content opens up on the right. For me, the app is painfully slow as every click on the tree is a full page reload which has to render the entire tree, as well as getting the content for that node. If I am on a site that has a normal link, I expect a page reload. When I click on a tree node, I am trained to be in "desktop mode" and expect it to happen pretty darn quick. It is this perceived effect that makes everything feel so slow.

I also glanced at my status bar and would see what seemed to be mini requests for each feed from my browser. I have a fair few feeds, so this made things even worse.

This type of design choice will make people think "ajax sucks and is slow". Compare it to Google Reader and others, that feel a lot faster, and do not do refreshes in places you wouldn't expect.

Squish for Webis a GUI testing tool aiming to be well suited for testing Ajax GUIs (and has special
support for many frameworks such as Backbase, dojo, ICEFaces, qooxdoo, JackBe, etc.)

The Squish for Web edition enables testing HTML-based Web and Web 2.0 (Ajax) applications in different web browsers running on different platforms.

Squish for Web is, unlike many available web testing tools, not restricted to a single web browser or platform. Squish for Web supports running and recording tests for web applications in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, Apple's Safari and KDE's Konqueror on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X.

Demos

• Introduction to Squish
• Testing a backbase application

Selenium seems to be the de facto standard these days, but we can always do with new tools to help us test. What do you use?

Ajax, events, packaging, CSS-based querying, animations, JSON, language utilities, and a lot more. All at 23K.

JSJaC is a jabber/XMPP client library written in JavaScript to ease implementation of web based jabber/XMPP clients. For communication with a jabber server it needs to support either HTTP Pollingor XMPP Over BOSH(formerly known as HTTP Binding). JSJaC has an object oriented design which should be quite easy to use. Communication is done by using the XML HTTP Request objectalso refered to as AJAX technology. Your browser must support this.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Mapsand Gmaileasy 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 Javaprogramming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.