I downloaded this, but haven’t played around with it yet, so I can’t offer any other opinion than I think it’s a great idea. Once I implement it and actually try it out, I’ll post with comprehensive feedback.

Jaxer – The AJAX Server

From Aptana.com:

“Jaxer is the world’s first true Ajax server. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are native to Jaxer, as are XMLHttpRequests, JSON, DOM scripting, etc. And as a server it offers access to databases, files, and networking, as well as logging, process management, scalability, security, integration APIs, and extensibility.”

While this tool is certainly no silver bullet for conquering the beast of web page performance, it does provide some useful stats and suggestions that you may have overlooked during your development cycle.

Check out the YSlow Firefox Add-On

In conjunction with the Firebug Add-On (please tell me you’re using Firebug) your arsenal for speeding up your web pages just got bigger.  Below is a screenshot of some of the things it exposes for you.

Ran into an interesting bug this morning with jQuery 1.2.2.  After testing a simple working jQuery function in FF, I then tested in IE and found that it didn’t work in IE.  The jQuery code is fairly straightforward, so I was extremely perplexed.

$("#existingFacilities").dblclick(function() {
	$("#selectedFacilities").append($("#existingFacilities option:selected").clone());
});

All this does is clone an option from one select box and append it to another when it is double-clicked. After a few minutes of debugging, I removed the clone() function and it worked. For some reason, IE won’t work with cloned objects in jQuery. So instead of having a copy of the same option in two select boxes, it’s removed from the first and added to the second.

Here’s my workaround.

$("#existingFacilities").dblclick(function() {
	var selectedOption = $("#existingFacilities option:selected");
	var newOption = new Option($(selectedOption).text(), $(selectedOption).val());
	var ops = $("#selectedFacilities").attr("options");

	if( typeof(ops) != "undefined" )
		ops[ops.length] = newOption;
	else
		$("#selectedFacilities").append(selectedOption.clone());
});

Hope this helps someone.

I just downloaded the Adobe Media Player, and am highly impressed.  The high-def video streaming is well done, the UI is impeccable, and it’s just plain cool!  Me and some of the guys I work with keep promising each other that we’ll do a simple AIR app to show off internally, but we just can’t seem to find the time.

Heck, I’ll just show this off!

Adobe Media Player on Adobe Labs

Tags: AIR, flex, media

jQuery 1.2.2 was announced today. Though this is a revision release, it’s a significant one and definitely worth considering an upgrade to your existing jQuery implementations.  If for nothing else, the 300% speed improvement for DOMElement.

You can download in several flavors:

• Minified and Gzipped (15k)
• Packed (28k)
• Uncompressed (93k)

jQuery 1.2.2 Release Notes