Ajax

Adobe Systems released on Monday beta versions of three programming projects for producing online applications that run in its Flash Player, software that's widely used but also under competitive threat from other Web technologies.

First is a beta version of Flash Catalyst, a programming tool that's meant for the designer crowd rather than the coding crowd. Catalyst lets designers create a Flash application's user interface in Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator applications, import the files, attach a variety of actions to user interface elements, then produce the Flash application for production or for handing off to more … Read more

It was the kind of detail that only experts in Web traffic analysis could love, but a technical change Google is making turns out to reveal something a lot more people care about: faster search results.

Specifically, Google is trying out a new way to present search results that uses the JavaScript programming language and the related Ajax interface technology, not just regular HTML, to display the information, Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said.

The reason: with the Ajax-enhanced search results, JavaScript is used to load the actual search results beneath the unchanging boilerplate above, a tactic that means only the … Read more

Despite the fact that Microsoft has competing products of its own, some influential folks within the company have seen some merits of "Open Web" technology that's a standard part of browsers.

The interesting case in point is Microsoft Office 14, the upcoming version of one of the company's core products and profit engines. The software, due in beta form in 2009, is of Microsoft's highest-profile efforts to bring its desktop software power to the Web.

Specifically, when it comes to the best tools for building rich Web applications, Microsoft has promoted its own Silverlight plug-in … Read more

Ajax DocumentViewer has released a browser helper tool that allows users to view any document in the app's quick preview option. Whenever users find a PDF or Microsoft file type in their browser, they can highlight the link and view it in the Ajax DocumentViewer without downloading it. The free tool is available now and doesn't require any registration.

Acquia, a company that provides open-source software for the Drupal content management system, announced the public beta release of its search tool Wednesday. Those who want to use it can download it from Acquia's site and install it … Read more

Docuter is a free online document host that launched in early January. Like Scribd, Docstoc (which is currently down), and others, it lets you upload documents from your hard drive or a URL. These can be viewed on the site or embedded in Web pages like what I've done below.

Docuter's claim to fame is that it supports "over 200" different types of documents (here's a list). This includes image files, and soon it will include audio and video files. Like Scribd, it lets you upload files of any size, which is nice for uncompressed, … Read more

Updated at 2:40 p.m. PDT with more details about Firefox 3.1 features.

Firefox 3.1 will run many Web-based applications such as Gmail faster through incorporation of a feature called TraceMonkey that dramatically speeds up programs written in JavaScript, Mozilla said Friday.

JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it's also become the plumbing for many rich Internet applications. However, because JavaScript has been hobbled by pokey performance, Web-based applications often struggled to work as responsively as "native" software running … Read more

Google announced two services Thursday that programmers can use to build services into Web sites that employ a site user's location.

The first is a tool for Web sites built with the Ajax programming method. The Ajax client location property provides Web sites with a rough estimate of a user's location based on his or Internet Protocol address, said Google engineer Steve Block on the Google Code blog. The property can be seen in action in the "news by state" feature on Google's 2008 election site API (application programming interface).

Second is an expected change to endow Google's Gears software with the ability to employ more detailed location information. … Read more

If ever something was neither fish nor fowl, it's Goosh, a Web-based command-line interface for Google.

On the one hand, Goosh creator Stefan Grothkopp shows off the power of Web 2.0 applications, with the browser becoming much more than a mere vessel for surfing from one hyperlink to another. People type into the browser window, and Goosh interprets their requests, runs them through Google's services, and displays the result.

With Goosh--short for Google shell--typing "web asparagus" retrieves a textual listing of the top four Google search results for the vegetable. Typing "translate en de … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, founders of Ajaxian, took the stage at the Google IO conference here Wednesday morning to talk about one of the technologies that has helped define Web 2.0, and is of course their area of expertise: Ajax.

The technology is one of the things that made Gmail stand out among its other Web mail brethren, with messages and an entire in-box that would load and open without turning the entire page blank--a large leap ahead of preexisting Web technologies.

While the two mainly discussed design and the nitty gritty of coding, they stressed the … Read more