ajax

LAS VEGAS--This year's Black Hat was pretty much summed up in a prescient keynote by Richard Clarke, the nation's former cyber security czar who is now a novelist and chairman of Good Harbor Consulting. Clarke said "we're building more and more of our economy on cyberspace 1.0, yet we have secured very little of cyberspace 1.0." The apparent speed gained in Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which is technology that divides processing tasks between the Web server (Web site) and the Web client (browser), has opened Web 2.0 to some old-school attacks. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Want to build a Web site with all the latest Ajax technology? Or how about "Ajaxifying" an existing application? Bryan Sullivan, Senior Research Engineer for SPI Labs, and Billy Hoffman, SPI Labs' team leader, did just that during their talk "Premature Ajax-ulation" Wednesday afternoon at Black Hat. The two said that often developers see only the code that works, and not how someone else may come along and exploit it.

To demonstrate, Sullivan and Hoffman built a mock travel Web site, Hacker Travel.com.

"We're actually using examples that we find from popular … Read more

Blogger users have gotten a few new treats in the past day or so:

Feed integration Blogger users can now redirect their Blogger feeds through FeedBurner by simply copying and pasting it in the Settings menu. Once FeedBurner is activated, Blogger users will be able to track how their content is being consumed, using tracking and metrics services. It's the first implementation of FeedBurner's technology in a Google product since the company was acquired in early June.

Polls Polls were a feature made available first in Blogger in Draft, before "graduating" to the regular version of … Read more

Steve Jobs's final "One Last Thing" announcement at the WWDC keynote today had to do with the iPhone. Instead of announcing a third-party developer kit like many thought he would, he encouraged the use of Web 2.0 and AJAX applications to be run entirely from the Safari browser (Which coincides nicely with the other announcement of a Windows version of Safari). Apple even demonstrated something called Apple Directory, a Safari Web application that lets you look up business contact cards. There's also a Google application that pulls up map and satellite imagery when a street … Read more

Google on Thursday at its Developer Day announced Google Gears, a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications offline. The first application to use Google Gears is Google Reader, its Web-based RSS feed reading application.

The download for the Google Gears beta is quick--the files are less than 1MB in size. Once you have it installed, the Web application you're connecting to asks you whether you want to allow it to store data locally.

Here's a news story with more details, including the technology architecture of Google Gears.

Although it stayed away from making specific commitments, we … Read more

After I covered Weebly, I got a note from the creator of Jimdo, another easy-to-use Web site creator tool. I took it for a quick spin, and I'm somewhat impressed. It has a lot of very strong features, it makes pretty sites, and it's free.

The service is especially good at handling photos. It does a great job displaying photos that you upload to it, and it also integrates beautifully with Flickr. There are good options for how the galleries are displayed, and when you zoom into a picture, it displays over the page instead of taking you … Read more

Intellicast weather service rolled out a new beta version of its site last week. Users have access to all the usual Internet weather services like local, national, and international forecasts, plus daily summaries with detailed information. For those who are wary to ditch their speedy weather widget to check the forecast, Intellicast employs Ajax for no-loading browsing--making it a fair bit more compelling than the average Internet weather service.

I could go on with boring details about barometric pressure and how the sunrise and sunset icons make me happy, but I'll spare you. You can check out Intellicast beta here.… Read more

If you ever find yourself needing to throw a basic site up on the Web quickly, it would be worth a few minutes of your time to check out Weebly, the 2.0 version of which launched today. It is a free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set, but as a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good), or just … Read more

XMG Image launched its public beta yesterday. The photo hosting and editing service gives you 200MB of free storage, with a bigger pro plan on the way. XMG Image offers the standard fare of individual and batch photo uploading, but adds extensive album and tag creation and management. There's also customized sharing for forums, Web sites, and blogs.

What differentiates XMG Image from other photo hosting sites is its use of new Web technologies like Ajax. Ajax pop-up dialogs are quickly overtaking regular old pop-up messages on sites, and XMG is no exception as nearly all the command options … Read more