Simon Willison’s Weblog

Django and Comet. How to build a chat application using Django and the Orbited comet server. Orbited can be set up to proxy most requests through to a Django backend while handling any comet requests itself. # 26th December 2007, 9:05 pm

AppJet: Instant Web Programming. Another attempt at simple server-side JavaScript application hosting. Worth checking out for the impressive syntax highlighting code editor, which even matches braces. # 15th December 2007, 3:37 pm

ExtInfoWindow 1.0: Ajax powered, CSS customization. Finally, a semi-official way of creating customised info windows for the Google Maps API. You lose the default shadow but gain the ability to style the entire info window using CSS. # 15th December 2007, 12:22 pm

Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery. # 14th December 2007, 2:44 pm

Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery. My contribution to 24 ways: using Mapstraction to geocode hCards (extracted with jQuery) and plot them on a Google Map. # 12th December 2007, 12:28 am

The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today. Absolutely the best summary I’ve seen of all of the current Comet techniques in one place. # 11th December 2007, 1:13 pm

Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets. Combine with Jash for interactive API experimentation on any web page. # 9th December 2007, 12:38 pm

Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. # 9th December 2007, 12:36 pm

JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.” # 8th December 2007, 2:04 pm

YUI 2.4.0 released. Lots of great new features, but the one I’m most excited about is Selector: YUI finally has a CSS query engine. # 5th December 2007, 3:32 pm

Datejs—A JavaScript Date Library. Building a date API around chaining—Date.today().next().thursday()—is a neat concept. I’d like to see that adapted for Python’s datetime library. # 3rd December 2007, 9:01 pm

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. 24ways kicks off again, with the first article introducing super-sleight, an updated script for getting transparent PNGs to work in IE6. # 1st December 2007, 12:03 am

Jetty WebServer. Jetty 6.1 was the only cometd / Bayeux implementation I tried which worked out of the box. # 27th November 2007, 6:43 pm

Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript. How Facebook’s new Beacon service (also known as “Facebook ruined Christmas”) actually works. # 25th November 2007, 9:20 pm

DebugBar. Suggested at BarCamp London 3 as a useful tool for developing with IE; apparently includes a great JavaScript debugger. # 25th November 2007, 10:32 am

A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet. Kris Zyp describes a conceptual model for Comet messages based on REST semantics (so you can send a PUT referencing a specific URI down to a client to represent an idempotent state change). # 21st November 2007, 8:18 pm

Weewar (Nat v.s. me). Really impressive turn based strategy game, implemented entirely in the browser. Surprisingly addictive; you have been warned. # 20th November 2007, 11:52 pm

IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function. # 19th November 2007, 11:48 am

JavaScript Beautifier (via) Useful online tool (source code also available) for un-obfuscating JavaScript that has had its whitespace stripped out. # 16th November 2007, 8:43 pm

Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page. # 16th November 2007, 3:58 pm

Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”. # 16th November 2007, 1:39 pm

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet? # 16th November 2007, 1:19 am

google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later. # 14th November 2007, 5:18 pm

JavaScript Method Overloading. John Resig shows a clever trick for overloading JavaScript methods based on the number of arguments, using the little-known .length property of a JavaScript function object. # 13th November 2007, 2:39 pm

HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events. # 12th November 2007, 11:21 pm

Eye-Fi launches. Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally. # 11th November 2007, 10:40 pm

JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events. Keyboard events in JavaScript are a total pain. This looks like a pretty comprehensive reference to getting them to work cross-browser. # 9th November 2007, 11:07 pm

Pseudo-custom events in Prototype 1.6. Useful tutorial showing how to use Prototype 1.6’s custom events to implement a cross-browser mouse wheel event. # 9th November 2007, 11:02 pm

dojo.NodeList API docs. Support in Dojo for jQuery-style chaining operations. # 8th November 2007, 11:16 am