Facebook Opens IM to Developers, Drops Ball on Interoperability

Facebook announced this morning that its wildly popular Instant Messaging service now supports the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber. That means that 3rd party developers will be able to build support for Facebook Chat into their websites and chat applications with ease.

Standards are great like this for making development simpler but the other promise of technical standards so far remains unrealized. Interoperability is the big promise of open standards in general and XMPP chat specifically, but at launch Facebook Chat by XMPP does not federate with other XMPP servers. So this isn't about interoperability, it's about further extending Facebook around the web.

Well, just as I thought i was getting the hang of javascript, I read this article, and Raphael seems to have a little more knowledge that I do. he has a really good go at Google's Developers :p

Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript

At the Edge of the Web conference in Perth last week I got to catch up with Dmitry Baranovskiy, the creator of the Raphaël and gRaphaël JavaScript libraries. Perhaps the most important thing these libraries do is make sophisticated vector graphics possible in Internet Explorer, where JavaScript performance is relatively poor. Dmitry, therefore, has little patience for poorly-written JavaScript like the code he found in Google’s just-released Closure Library.

Having delivered a talk on how to write your own JavaScript library (detailed notes) at the conference, Dmitry shared his thoughts on the new library over breakfast the next morning. “Just what the world needs—another sucky JavaScript library,” he said. When I asked him what made it ‘sucky’, he elaborated. “It’s a JavaScript library written by Java developers who clearly don’t get JavaScript.”

For the rest of the day, to anyone who would listen, Dmitry cited example after example of the terrible code he had found when he went digging through Closure. His biggest fear, he told me, was that people would switch from truly excellent JavaScript libraries like jQuery to Closure on the strength of the Google name.

This is now an interesting read if you're an (X)HTML geekn3rdz0r

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element

So i've been working on a client project, and a really awesome project I might add, I crossed a challenge yesterday which was to be overcome by using a carousel to display more information that there was space for :p (I'll blog the site when it's live, hecne the desciptionlessness)

So bearing mind timesframes and me not having enough time to write my own carousel in the alloted time, and the fact that we're already using protoype.js (v1.6.3 with IE8 compat) I thought let me try and find one... I came across Prototype : Carousel (http://code.google.com/p/prototype-carousel/)

It's written by a spanish Gent I think, but damn well written, and really nice to use, although I nearly tore my hair out cause there are certain scenarios that made it now work for me, but now it does :p

Ghkoookay! if ya'll need to use, go ahead and use.

A huge congrats to one of our staff, Igor who's just passed his Zend Engineer qualification, and is now ofifcially a zend certified Engineer, awesome to have another one on our team!!

So I'm not really a PHP Fundi, or progammer for that matter, BUT here in the office we did come accross this fantastic State selector for the US, if anyone wants, it's really efficient, hahahaha

The Ultimate state selector

I've been meaning to blog this since 1st september when the newest version of prototype was realeased,  greater support for IE8 (thanks microsoft, for releasing something YET AGAIN, different, choppers)..

aaaaaannyyy ways, the release is pretty damn robust, seems they've written the new release in a slightly different way, added support for Chrome as well.

Once really cool thing that came out of this release was a new API documentation, which can be found at http://api.prototypejs.org

 

Been browsing one (there are more) of my favorite resources sitepoint, and came across this little post about a few password storage apps, I think I need to download one of em cause i'm pretty useless with remembering password, infact, I might as well stop while i'm ahead so cause I prolly wont remember to use any of these apps.

eish.

http://tinyurl.com/klaqd5

Was reading this article about CSS3, and how when it's fully implimented things are going to become much easier, now I know some of you might have read my post of CSS Wishlist where I stated that we should not confuse CSS with some fancy programming language, none the less, have a read over this article, some handy things coming up.

Only problem is.... how long are we going to wait for this to be FULLY integrated.

http://tinyurl.com/lmal7m

G'damn my problem at the moment is that I just dont have time to check the problems out on my site, there is a see-ree-ass russian or something spambot killing my GPU and Bandwidth, so I got frustrated and turned the setting to PHP4 which broke my site :p

None the less, folks we're back up and running again, as I could not live with myself missing another TFWB eksê