Eclipse and iPhone development

Eclipse now supports iPhone development by an Aptana plugin, LeNettoyeur reports. I’ve been dealing with aptana months ago, in this post.

You might want to have a look, it’s got some quite interesting features IMHO.

Looking forward for the iPhone to ship in Italy as well .

Actually integrating Firefox + del.icio.us (at last)

I just installed this Firefox add-on (by Yahoo! Inc.), which actually allows to integrate your del.icio.us account into your Firefox profile.

Well, it’s quite straightforward so I won’t bother getting into the details, but it’s absolutely worth a try.

So far I used to use another extension which just allowed the user to tag a page and add it to his del.icio.us bookmarks: the feeling I had before was that my del.icio.us bookmarks were just separated from my Firefox bookmarks (and they actually were). Now I really feel they are a single, integrated set, since I can browse, add and search links in Firefox.

Some months ago I actually thought having such an extension would be nice, glad to see guys @ Yahoo! worked on it.

Aptana Web IDE

It’s been out there for some months already, but I just discovered it through Yahoo! User Interface Blog: Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic – AJAX - web applications.

It is available as a standalone app for Windows, Linux and Mac; and of course as an Eclipse plug-in too (which is in my opinion the solution most of people will choose).

A screencast – embedded in the Yahoo! blog post linked above – is showing Aptana’s most significant features, and its YUI support. Very nice.

Revisiting the good old 80/20 rule: websites performances

The first of a series of posts @ Yahoo! User Interface blog about some experiments to spot where most of the time a user waits for a page to show up is wasted.

“Most performance optimization today are made on the parts that generate the HTML document (apache, C++, databases, etc.), but those parts only contribute to about 20% of the user’s response time. It’s better to focus on optimizing the parts that contribute to the other 80%.”

Performance-aware web pages design is getting pivotal nowadays and, from a global perspective, the general load the network infrastructures have to handle would decrease significantly if designers kept in mind such issues.

Yahoo! performance researching indeed provided the following – quite predictable though – result: “…90% of the time is spent fetching other components in the page including images, scripts and stylesheets“.

This is, by the way, one of the preminent aspects the omnipresent AJAX technology has impact against, and in my opinion – almost – the only one to justify such enthusiasm: it is well known that asynchronous page refreshing saves a lot of time, and reduces the http server-to-client traffic.

Unfortunately the linked post does not deal with the impact of browser caching, which is very important as well; anyway, the big picture is always the same: websites performances increase as the number of HTTP requests get lower.

Eleventh: don’t just AJAX everything

In a moment where it seems impossibile to get online without actually reading tons of blog posts or articles about Web 2.0, it’s nice to read some original point of view about the actual AJAX impact over industry and innovation (if any), considering the architectural implications and debating about which road should we go.

“Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.”

In this post @ deal architect Vinnie Mirchandani deals with Bill Thompson’s article @ regdeveloper.co.uk, where the Web 2.0 “madness” is harshly criticized (with a bunch of – IMHO – nice politically-motivated metaphores ).

To be honest, I subscribe to this point of view: first of all I can’t quite understand where this enthusiasm about a late-1990 web development technique comes from; XmlHTTPRequest has been there since much earlier, it’s not rocket science, nor cuttin’ edge technology.

Furthermore, I definitely agree with Thompson’s invitation not to focus ourselves that much about the presentation layer: the way we present data is absolutely important, but the actual innovation is elsewhere to be chased. Engineering should face (and its actually facing) much more complicated challenges than asynchronous <div> refreshing.

Whatever, I believe there’s no chance to get a better conclusion for this post than Thompson’s one, so I’ll steal his one:

“The time has come to stand up and be counted, and we need people who can count in hex and see beyond the Web 2.0 hype. “

Google: AJAX Search API and Web Toolkit

I just discovered through Google Code an interesting AJAX API set to add a dynamic searchbox to your pages. Take a look at it here, it’s very sleek, responsive and (most of all) won’t ever take visitors away from your pages .

The nice thing is you can even use the APIs to build – powerful – Google Search-based AJAX applications, maybe using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) if it fits your needs .

GWT, for those of you who weren’t on earth last weeks , is a compiler producing browser-compliant javascript code from java classes.

In my opinion it really relieves developers’ burden of writing and debugging thousands lines of javascript working on Internet Explorer XOR Firefox.

I believe after all there has to be some kind of formal proof that the intersection between lines of script code correctly working on IE and those working on Firefox is the empty set, and that the exact location of a bug in a javascript page is subject to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, so GWT is definitely high in my “things to study” stack.