will_paginate is very well designed plugin. Besides ActiveRecord object integration, it can integrate with array and any collection that you may have. The README.rdoc (in version 2.2.2) and wiki clearly and concisely document how to use it with ActiveRecord objects. I recently needed to use it for a collection outside of activerecord and here is how I did it.
Read more »OK, one more thing on GWT 1.5: additions to JRE emulation. If you’ve tried to port some existing Java code into the client, you really feel the absence of some of these. It’s still painful, but every bit helps.
I’ve been working with GWT 1.5 out of the source repository for a few months, so the release announcements for GWT 1.5 kind of went by unnoticed. But now it’s getting serious. GWT 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is out, which means that GWT 1.5 is soon to follow and everyone will soon be enjoying the benefits of 1.5 that I’ve been relishing for a while. What are some of those benefits?
We can certainly attest to the fact that combining ASP.NET with third party Ajax frameworks can have it’s pitfalls. Dave Ward has put together an excellent and extensive post on his experiences integrating jQuery with ASP.NET.
I’ve came across an interesting article titled The Next-Gen Web: HTML5 – Will We Ever See A Real Standard? by Nik Cubrilovic that gives a nice overview of the history of web standards while focusing on the current HTML5 draft specification and its potential.
Web standards are not something particularly interesting to me as an Adobe Flex developer. After all, one of the reasons I’ve chosen this technology is that I can develop web applications without those standards limiting my imagination.
Adobe Flash technology is in part setting the standards of what Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0) really mean. Web experiences made using it are on the high end of what’s available today and that’s where I want to be.
One major lacking of this technology is that it is not utilizing web standards which makes some tasks harder, like making sites and apps search engine friendly, for example. I personally decided that its benefits significantly outweigh the problems.
Whatever one’s perspective, I think that lack of full implementation of web standards causes a huge waste of time for people developing content for the web. Until that happens, I choose to ignore them altogether and use a medium that gives the same results on all platforms. To the best of my knowledge, content developed in Flash years ago still looks and acts the same in all browsers and operation systems.
You can find some great insight on what might be the future of web standards in Nik’s article. In the meantime, my money stays with Flex.
Just a quick mention that part 1 of my article series on using Rails to write iPhone apps is online at IBM developerWorks.
Parts 2 and 3 will be published sometime in the rather near future.
Oh, and a longer RailsConf piece will be coming later this week, along with the winner or winners of the free book drawing… stay tuned.
Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Ruby on Rails Development, Custom Software Development
I haven’t tried to hide my ambivalence about Adobe’s move into the RIA market. That’s why I feel duty-bound to share my positive experience with a newish AIR application: Tumblweed, a desktop client for the Tumblr micro-blogging service.
Currently in beta release, with new iterations coming quickly, Tumblweed lets you post photos, quotes, links, audio and full blog posts – any of Tumblr’s supported content types – without hitting your browser. None of this would be possible, of course, without Tumblr’s http-based API. But props to Tumblweed creator David Merino for building an application that’s minimalist yet user-centric.
Tumblweed currently supports a subset of the functionality you can access on-site. You can create posts, though editing or deleting them appears to be wonky (at least on my machine, a MacBook Pro running OS X Tiger). You can drag-and-drop photos instead of using a clunky, web-based upload mechanism. You can even copy images directly from the clipboard.
It would be nice if Tumbleweed provided better visual feedback about the image currently being uploaded. I expect such usability issues to improve in subsequent releases. In the meantime, thoughtful touches abound. For instance, the Snapshot dialog lets me take a photo using my Mac’s built-in camera and upload it to Tumblr just like any other photo.
As a blogging client, Tumblweed already delivers value. As a showcase for AIR, it overcame my cautious cynicism about Adobe. The melding of webapp and desktop capabilities proves as compelling in practice as it did in theory at last year’s Adobe MAX conference. It pains me to admit it, but I find myself eager to build an AIR app of my own.
A new release of jQuery is out — 1.2.6, skipping directly from 1.2.3. Most noteworthy are the performance improvements (you can check out the detailed performance data via this Google Spreadsheet). The headlines on improvements:
Lots of other fixes, but the most important, IMHO, is the inclusion of Brandon Aaron’s Dimension’s plugin — cross browser support for find element dimensions, offsets and positioning — in the jQuery core. Check out the release notes here.
Songbird, the Mozilla-based, web-enabled media player and mash-up tool, grows ever closer to its 0.6 release. Version 0.6rc2 went out over the weekend, and it’s packed with goodies. Of particular interest to yours truly, 0.6 includes improved performance for large media libraries and a spiffy new metadata editor that actually writes back to the individual music files. Until now, the absence of these features has kept me from adopting Songbird as my day-to-day media player; I’m now anxious to see whether Songbird can become, for me at least, an iTunes killer.
If you, too, are interested in the latest Songbird 0.6 release candidate, you can read the overview, download the executable or peruse our previous coverage of the project.
