WebProNews

Tag: web development

  • All Websites Should be Using AMP

    All Websites Should be Using AMP

    John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google in Switzerland, confirmed what everybody is thinking, Google and the AMP Team ultimately intends for almost all sites to display AMP versions for mobile devices. “If you ask the AMP team, they will tell you that all websites should be using AMP, “Mueller said in replying to a question from a Hangout participant. “So to some extent, I can see that making sense. It’s definitively one way to make really fast websites, or websites that load almost instantly.”

    “If you’ve been holding off because you’re saying, well, my website doesn’t need this, then maybe it makes sense to take a look again and see what it does now,” Mueller said. “So at the moment, we only show it for the kind of in the news, carousel on top, the top stories and that’s something where I expected to kind of expand to other parts of the search results as well.”

    Meuller was also asked about the recent news about eBay adopting AMP, “I think with the eBay one, even though it was an AMP, they couldn’t add to cart, or something like that,” responded Mueller. “They didn’t have that functionality on the site.”

    “There’s definitely some things that don’t work so well with AMP at the moment,” says Meuller. “But it’s an open source project, so I think people from eBay are active there as well, making new components and that’s something that I expect to evolve over time.” The Webmaster Trends Analyst added, “I am really happy that someone like eBay is taking the time to do these kind of experiments, because even if they’re not showing in search yet, we can’t get there without people actively trying things that kind of go past what’s possible now.”

    “I imagine if someone like eBay can get it to work for their site, which is really dynamic, which requires a lot of interaction, then that’s something that’ll be possible for a lot of other sites as well,” concluded Meuller.

    Check out the discussion in the Google Hangout video below:

    Ebay clearly believes that AMP is for more than just publishers and thinks it would be great for all kinds of websites and especially for ecommerce. “The speed aspect was very critical for us, and we wanted to do more for speed,” stated Senthil Padmanabhan, Principal Web Engineer at eBay. “That is when we ran into AMP.”

    The AMP project was announced around the same time we started the initial brainstorming for browse. It seemed to resonate a lot with our own thinking on how we wanted to render the new experience. Although AMP was more tuned towards publisher-based content, it was still an open source project built using the open web. Also, a portion of the traffic to the new browse experience is going to be from search engines, which made it more promising to look into AMP. So we quickly pinged the AMP folks at Google and discussed the idea of building an AMP version for the browse experience, in addition to the normal mobile web pages. They were very supportive of it. This positive reaction encouraged us to start looking into AMP technology for the eCommerce world and in parallel develop an AMP version of browse.

    Today we are proud to announce that the AMP version of the new browse experience is live, and about 8 million AMP-based browse nodes are available in production. Check out some of the popular queries in a mobile browser — Camera Drones and Sony PlayStation, for example. Basically adding amp/ to the path of any browse URL will render an AMP version (for example, non-AMP, AMP). We have not linked all of them from our regular (non-AMP) pages yet. This step is waiting on few pending tasks to be completed. For now, we have enabled this new browse experience only in mobile web. In the next couple of weeks, the desktop web experience will also be launched.

    “We are excited to partner with Google and everyone else participating on the AMP Project to close the gap in launching a full-fledged eCommerce experience in AMP,” says Padmanabhan. “We have created a combined working group to tackle the gap, and we will be looking into these items and more.” The items Padmanabhan is referring to include smart buttons, input elements, advanced tracking and A/B testing. “With items like these in place, AMP for eCommerce will soon start surfacing.”

    “We will also be looking into creating a seamless transition from the AMP view to a regular page view, similar to what the Washington Post did using Service Workers.” Padmanabhan added. “This will enable users to have a complete and delightful eBay experience without switching contexts.”

    “We are on our path to making eBay the world’s first place to shop and this is a step towards it,” concluded Padmanabhan.

  • New Google Tool To Test Your Sites Mobile Performance

    New Google Tool To Test Your Sites Mobile Performance

    Google launched a new tool today called “Test My Site” at testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. The tool helps you find out how well your site works across mobile and desktop devices, but its primary purpose is to make the mobile web experience faster.

    The new tool is part of the ‘think with Google‘ website that Google uses to announce studies and trends aimed in industry and to help webmasters and businesses make decisions. Google’s describes the site as a take on fresh marketing and a look at what’s next. It’s the place to go to find insights, trends and research in digital media and marketing. Google describes it as creative inspiration, industry intelligence and best practices for marketing leaders.

    The new site testing tool provides 3 categories of measurement, MOBILE FRIENDLINESS, MOBILE SPEED and DESKTOP SPEED. Each of these areas receive a score of 1-100 and a link to view ways to improve. Here is an example from the Drudge Report, a site known not to be mobile friendly:

    Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 4.39.27 PM

    Here’s what Google says your scores say about your site

    • Mobile-friendliness: This is the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. To be mobile-friendly, your site should have tappable buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen, and have the most important information up front and center.
    • Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. If customers are kept waiting for too long, they’ll move on to the next site.
    • Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers. It’s not just the strength of your customers’ web connection that determines speed, but also the elements of your website.

  • Facebook Sets Date For F8, Expands It To 2 Days

    Facebook announced the date for its next F8 developer conference. Not only that, but it has doubled the time it’s giving to devs, extending the event to two days.

    F8 will take place in San Francisco on March 25 and 26.

    Facebook is inviting the technical community to two full days of sessions, workshops, product demos, and “1:1 time” with Facebook’s product experts.

    Why two days this time?

    Facebook says, “Facebook’s developer community is bigger today than it ever has been. The scope of the company’s products has broadened, and there’s more content to share than can fit into a single day. The additional day means double the number of technical sessions, product demos, and onsite experiences for Facebook’s growing developer community.”

    This year, F8 featured quite a few announcements, including the Facebook Audience Network, FB Start, App Links, anonymous login, and more.

    This was the first F8 the company held since 2011, so it’s nice to see the company getting back in touch with developers. The fact that they’ve added another day seems to suggest they’re going to be giving even more love in the coming year.

    Invitation and registration details will be available in early 2015.

    Image via Facebook

  • Mozilla Teases Browser For Developers [#Fx10]

    Mozilla has a new browser specifically dedicated to developers coming out soon. It will be unveiled on November 10th. Mozilla teased it with a brief video on Monday:

    “When building for the Web, developers tend to use a myriad of different tools which often don’t work well together,” Mozilla said in a blog post. “This means you end up switching between different tools, platforms and browsers which can slow you down and make you less productive. So we decided to unleash our developer tools team on the entire browser to see how we could make your lives easier.”

    “We’ve redesigned the browser by looking at it through a completely new filter to put developers’ interests first,” it added. “It’s built by developers for developers so you can debug the whole Web, allowing you to more easily build awesome Web experiences. It also integrates some powerful new tools like WebIDE and the Firefox Tools Adapter. Soon, we’re going to bring you more, a lot more, in a package that you deserve as a builder for an independent Web.”

    We’ll be learning plenty more about what Mozilla has in store in a week. Stay Tuned.

    Image via YouTube

  • Yahoo Stops Development On User Interface library

    Yahoo Stops Development On User Interface library

    Yahoo announced that it is stopping development on the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI). It’s been around since 2005, and was launched to the public the following year.

    The library offere developers free, open source JavaScript and CSS tools and utilities for building web apps.

    The company says it will no focus its efforts on the “new technology landscape”. New YUI releases will only take place when they’re “absolutely critical” to Yahoo properties, and will be few and far between.

    Yahoo says on its engineering blog:

    It has become clear to us that the industry is now headed in a new direction. As most of you know, the web platform has been undergoing a drastic transformation over the past few years. JavaScript is now more ubiquitous than ever. The emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating isomorphic single page applications. New package managers (npm, bower) have spurred the rise of an ecosystem of 3rd party, open source, single-purpose tools that complement each other, embracing the UNIX philosophy and enabling very complex development use cases. New build tools (Grunt and its ecosystem of plugins, Broccoli, Gulp) have made it easier to assemble those tiny modules into large, cohesive applications. New application frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, Polymer, Angular, etc.) have helped architect web applications in a more scalable and maintainable way. New testing tools (Mocha, Casper, Karma, etc.) have lowered the barrier of entry to building a solid continuous delivery pipeline. Standard bodies (W3C, Ecma) are standardizing what the large JavaScript frameworks have brought to the table over the years, making them available natively to a larger number of devices. Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards. With so called “evergreen web browsers”, which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents.

    The consequence of this evolution in web technologies is that large JavaScript libraries, such as YUI, have been receiving less attention from the community. Many developers today look at large JavaScript libraries as walled gardens they don’t want to be locked into. As a result, the number of YUI issues and pull requests we’ve received in the past couple of years has slowly reduced to a trickle. Most core YUI modules do not have active maintainers, relying instead on a slow stream of occasional patches from external contributors. Few reviewers still have the time to ensure that the patches submitted are reviewed quickly and thoroughly.

    The company says the team behind the YUI will continue to work on next-generation presentation technologies, and will initially focus on internal developers.

    Image via Yahoo

  • Use Of C Programming Languages May Be On The Decline

    The C programming language family is some of the most popular on the planet. Just looking at the TIOBE Index, we see that C, Objective-C, C++ and C# are all in the top five with their rankings not changing in over a year. Those who look deeper into these things predict that C’s time in the spotlight may be coming to an end, however, thanks to some rising stars.

    Andrew Binstock over at Dr. Dobb’s recently penned a blog post that argues the dominance of C may be threatened in the coming years. By using a variety of programming language indexes, including the TIOBE Index, he points out languages meant to replace C and C++ have been on the rise over the last year.

    For starters, D, a language meant to replace C++, climbed to the 18th spot on the TIOBE Index over the last year. It began in the 35th spot in January of 2013. Binstock speculates that D’s rise in the chart may be due to Facebook engineers adopting the language. C++ may also be on the decline thanks to developers moving around from desktop development to mobile where C++ is rarely used.

    As for C, Google’s Go programming language is the biggest threat facing the world’s most popular programming language. According to the TIOBE Index, Go is currently sitting at 36th place, but it’s rank is expected to climb in 2014. Binstock says that C will also face threats from Mozilla’s Rust and Nimrod in 2014, but he doesn’t expect its popularity to wane too much.

    So, what about Objective-C and C#? For Objective-C, Binstock expects it to remain popular due to Apple requiring iOS developers to use it. For C#, he feels that it could become more popular among .NET developers in the coming year.

    Image via TIOBE

  • Full Screen Mario Attracts The Ire Of Nintendo

    In 1990, John Carmack ported the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 to the PC to prove that side-scrolling graphics could be done on the platform. He then presented this breakthrough to Nintendo, but the company wasn’t interested in the PC market as it was still rolling in the dough thanks to the NES. That rejection ultimately led to the creation of Commander Keen, and id Software changed gaming forever.

    I open with the tale of the founding of id Software because a similar situation is happening again. A college student by the name of Josh Goldberg has recreated Super Mario Bros. in HTML5. Much like side-scrolling on PCs in the late 80s, something like Super Mario Bros. being recreated entirely in HTML5 is entirely new. Unfortunately, Nintendo isn’t as docile regarding its intellectual property anymore.

    According to The Washington Post, Nintendo is seeking to have the game, which can be found at fullscreenmario.com, to be shut down. The company says it “respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to respect ours as well.”

    It’s certainly reasonable for Nintendo to protect its IP, but it’s not like Goldberg just uploaded a ROM like so many Flash developers do with classic Nintendo games. Instead, he built the entire game piece-by-piece in HTML5 himself just to prove he could. It’s Nintendo’s right to have it taken down, but it’s a shame to go about it this way. Nintendo should work with Goldberg to encourage his development skills and maybe even have him create an entirely new game for Nintendo’s new Web Framework development tools. Throwing a C&D letter at him doesn’t foster creativity – it hinders it.

    As you would expect, the debate over Full Screen Mario has also reawakened the debate on corporate copyright. Under the current law, corporate owned copyrights are valid for 95 years. In other words, the original Super Mario Bros. won’t enter the public domain until 2082. Everybody’s favorite Taiwanese animators examined the issue in further depth today:

    Once again, nobody here is arguing that Nintendo is wrong for wanting to see Full Screen Mario wiped off the face of the Internet. It’s entirely within its right to do so. In doing so, however, Nintendo is also killing a growing community of coders and aspiring game designers who are contributing to the open source project with code and custom levels. To kill it now would be a giant middle finger to all those who grew up with the game and now want to make it better.

    [Image: FullScreenMario.com]

  • XML Found To Be Just As Fast As JSON

    XML Found To Be Just As Fast As JSON

    Since its introduction in 1996, XML has taken the world by storm by providing an easy to use markup language that’s used in everything from RSS to office productivity software. Its main competitor – JSON – is often quoted as being superior due to it being faster while using less bandwidth. One engineer has set to prove that wrong.

    David Lee, lead engineer at MarkLogic, has published a paper called “Fat Markup: Trimming the Myth One Calorie At A Time.” The paper documents an experiment where he pit XML against JSON in almost 1,200 tests covering 33 different documents across multiple Web browsers and operating systems. The results may surprise you.

    Upon the conclusion of the experiment, Lee had found four areas that show XML and JSON are both slaves to outside influences. The first conclusion found that the parsing speed changes depending on which parsing technique is used with XML performing better with pure JavaScript while JSON performs betters with query speed. The second conclusion found that jQuery slows down both markup languages, but XML sees a bigger dip in performance. The third conclusion found that compressed documents, regardless of format, are the same size across both markup languages. The final conclusion found that transfer speed is largely the same across both markup languages.

    So, what does this all mean? The needless fighting over which markup language is better doesn’t make the Web a better place. Lee instead recommends that developers focus on making their Web sites more efficient so that both XML and JSON can perform at their best. To that end, he recommends the use of HTTP Compression and markup optimization. He does provide one caveat though. Developers shouldn’t try to optimize unless there’s a significant problem with data transmission on their Web site.

    [Image: Dreftymac/WikiMediaCommons]
    [h/t: InfoQ]

  • Adobe Recommends Reinstalling Java To Fix ColdFusion Installer Errors

    Adobe Recommends Reinstalling Java To Fix ColdFusion Installer Errors

    Java is a basic requisite for many Web applications. Unfortunately, Oracle sometimes pushes out an update that either lacks proper security fixes or prevents an application from installing. Adobe says the latest update affected its ColdFusion installer and has offered a fix.

    In a post on the ColdFusion blog, Adobe’s Krishna Reddy says the latest Java update prevents the ColdFusion Installer from launching on Mac OS X. The original Java update was pushed in mid-June, but it’s since been patched. The problem is that some ColdFusion users may have installed the broken Java update, and those users may not have received the patched version.

    For those users, Reddy recommends that ColdFusion users on Mac OS X download the latest Java update direct from Apple’s Web site. Mac OS X 10.7/10.8 users should download the latest Java update from here, and Mac OS X 10.6.8 users can grab their version here.

    Reddy then recommends that all ColdFusion users perform the following test to ensure that they have the proper version of Java installed:

    To know, if you have properly patched version is there or not execute the following command:

    >/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -version

    (a)

    java version “1.6.0_51”

    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_51-b11-456-11M4508)

    (b)

    java version “1.6.0_51”

    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_51-b11-457-11M4509)

    If you are getting result as in (a) you are not on a properly patched Java. You need to manually download and Install Java.

    If you are getting result as in (b) you are good to go (See the difference in build number).

    In other ColdFusion news, Adobe will be hosting its annual ColdFusion Summit in Las Vegas on October 24-25. Spots are filling up fast so Adobe recommends that you register now if you plan on attending. You can register for the summit, check out sessions and see who’s speaking at the official site.

  • PHP 5.5 Updated, Version 5.3 On Its Way Out

    PHP is the weapon of choice for many Web developers. It’s a good thing then that the team behind it has been very diligent with its releases. In fact, they have recently released an update to address some bugs that have popped up in the latest version.

    If you recall, the PHP Group in late June released PHP 5.5. This latest version included a number of additions and enhancements. For a refresher, here’s all the new stuff that was added:

  • Added generators and coroutines.
  • Added the finally keyword.
  • Added a simplified password hashing API.
  • Added support for constant array/string dereferencing.
  • Added scalar class name resolution via ::class.
  • Added support for using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions.
  • Added support for non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach.
  • Added support for list() constructs in foreach statements.
  • Added the Zend OPcache extension for opcode caching.
  • The GD library has been upgraded to version 2.1 adding new functions and improving existing functionality.
  • A lot more improvements and fixes.

    • Since then, the PHP Group has been work at work on updating all three major versions of PHP – version 5.3, 5.4 and the latest 5.5 release. Last week, the team released PHP 5.5.1 – a small update that addressed about 20 bugs. One in particular was a bug that was affecting security in the XML sparser.

    They aren’t strictly focusing on version 5.5, however, as the PHP Group also released PHP 5.4.17 in early July. The update fixed about 20 bugs.

    As for PHP 5.3, the team released version 5.3.27 this month as well. They say, however, that it will be the last regular release in the PHP 5.3 series. There will only be security fixes from here on out so Web developers are encouraged to upgrade to version 5.4 or 5.5 immediately.

    If you want to grab any of the above updates, you can access all three at the PHP download page. The Windows binaries are also available there.

  • ASP.NET Sees Further Enhancement In Visual Studio 2013 Preview

    For a while now, developers have been able to test drive the latest Visual Studio as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Like any good preview, Microsoft has been constantly improving it as developers give them feedback, including some enhancements to ASP.NET.

    Microsoft recently announced that it was bringing a number of ASP.NET and Web Tools enhancements to its Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The enhancements include a new UI, new authentications and updates for MVC 5 and SignalR.

    To start off, Microsoft notes that it’s added a “simple UI for creating projects that offer support for multiple ASP.NET frameworks.” Developers will be able to use different authentication configurations, including individual user accounts, organizational accounts and Windows authentication. They note that all configurations work the same across all ASP.NET frameworks.

    Speaking of authentication, ASP.NET authentication is now based on the OWIN middleware. It’s part of what Microsoft calls Project Katana – an effort on the part of Microsoft to make ASP.NET more flexible to the meet the demands of the open Web. In the latest update, Project Katana added “an HttpListener-based sever, a self-host API and OwinHost executable for running OWIN applications without having to create a custom host.”

    Microsoft also notes that ASP.NET now supports claims-based authentication. This type of authentication allows developers to “authorize requests from client applications to your Web APIs using OAuth2 2.0 bearer tokens.”

    On a final note, Microsoft has updated ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API 2, Scaffolding and SignalR. There’s nothing all that notable from these updates except for a small change that sees MVC projects being standard Web applications now instead of using their own custom project GUID.

    If you want to check out the new Visual Studio 2013 Preview alongside the enhancements being made to ASP.NET, you can grab the install here.

  • ColdFusion Whitepaper Details Future Iterations In Software Roadmap

    ColdFusion Whitepaper Details Future Iterations In Software Roadmap

    Adobe is making headlines this week with its controversial decision to discontinue development of Creative Suite in favor of Creative Cloud, but that’s not all we’re seeing from its annual MAX Conference. ColdFusion, Adobe’s Web development software, is the subject of a recent whitepaper that details where the software is at and where it’s headed in the future.

    Adobe sponsored a whitepaper from IDC called “Turning Up the Heat with ColdFusion,” and it’s mostly what you would expect from a company-sponsored analysis of its own software. There’s heaps of praise thrown upon ColdFusion for its ease of use while offering all the tools professionals need to build and scale enterprise grade Web sites.

    That’s all fine and dandy, but the whitepaper gets really interesting once it gets into future developments. It provides some early details on where Adobe is heading with future versions of ColdFusion. For ColdFusion Server, Adobe has two new releases on the horizon that will add a number of features and enhancements:

    Adobe has discussed the broad outline of the next two releases of ColdFusion server — Splendor and Dazzle. In between releases, the team has continued to work on other aspects. For example, support for the popular Amazon cloud in the form of a Splendor AMI was released in early 2013, providing users with a quick and simplified approach to deploying ColdFusion applications in the Amazon cloud. The key thematic areas of improvements for Splendor include bringing ColdFusion into the era of mobile
    application development and support for social applications. Special emphasis is planned for additional security features, building on the significant security work done for release 10 and taking its priorities from the OWASP Top Ten Project. Improved manageability and deployment as well as revamped and new PDF integration functionality are also planned.

    For the Dazzle release, expansion of the mobile platform support capabilities and support for multiscreen content are planned. Dazzle is also expected to carry the water for Adobe’s aggressive push into the digital marketing space by introducing deeper Web, mobile, and social analytics functionality. A customizable enterprise video portal is also planned, and capabilities that will enable ColdFusion to run in cloud environments in major cloud platforms are expected in the Dazzle release. Finally, the improvements are expected to be accompanied by a strong focus on security, extending the work done with Splendor and prioritizing mobile security according to the OWASP Mobile Security Project.

    As for ColdFusion Builder, Adobe plans to also release two new versions to coincide with the Server releases:

    Adobe has also identified key work areas for two future releases of ColdFusion Builder. The Thunder release is expected to play a key role in the end-to-end development workflow for mobile application development as well as provide a professional JavaScript authoring experience. Focus on new developers will be delivered with new workflows around a “getting started” scenario. The following release, code-named Blizzard, is expected to coincide with the Dazzle server release and to feature one-click multiscreen support, deployment support in line with Dev/Ops integration trends, and improved test and debug workflows.

    The rest of the whitepaper catalogs the various challenges facing ColdFusion, and how Adobe can turn those challenges into opportunities. It also contains a variety of case studies from various software development houses. You can read up on all of that here.

  • Unity Game Engine to End Flash Support

    It appears that Apple has been right all along that Flash is not the future of the web. Unity this week announced that it will be phasing out support for Adobe Flash development.

    Unity is a multi-platform game engine that is capable of producing games for consoles, PCs, touch devices, and the web. In particular, the engine has been used to create some of the most popular mobile games in recent years, such as Rovio’s Bad Piggies.

    David Helgason, CEO of Unity, announced in a blog post on Tuesday that the company has stopped selling Flash development licenses.

    Unity will continue to support its existing Flash customers “throughout the 4.x cycle.” Bug fixes will be made in future Unity 4.x iterations, but further development for the Unity engine on the platform has ceased.

    The decision was made, Helgason stated, because of Adobe. Helgason called recent versions of Flash unstable and stated that, “We don’t see Adobe being firmly committed to the future development of Flash.” He also pointed out that Adobe has cancelled the Flash Player Next project.

    Instead of Flash, Unity will be concentrating its development on its own Unity Web Player. Helgason stated that the Unity Web Player is installed on over 200 million computers and is used by one-third of all “Facebook gamers.”

  • PHP Upgraded To Version 5.4.14, PCRE Library Merged

    Those who use PHP are in for a treat this month as the development team has released updates for both the current and old versions, 5.4 and 5.3 respectively, of the scripting language. There’s nothing major, of course, but there are a number of bug fixes that developers should be aware of.

    Starting with PHP 5.4, the latest update brings it up to version 5.4.14. With this update, the team has fixed more than 10 bugs. Here’s the full changelog:

    Core:

  • Fixed bug #64529 (Ran out of opcode space).
  • Fixed bug #64515 (Memoryleak when using the same variablename two times in function declaration).
  • Fixed bug #64432 (more empty delimiter warning in strX methods).
  • Fixed bug #64417 (ArrayAccess::&offsetGet() in a trait causes fatal error).
  • Fixed bug #64370 (microtime(true) less than $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT’]).
  • Fixed bug #64239 (Debug backtrace changed behavior since 5.4.10 or 5.4.11).
  • Fixed bug #63976 (Parent class incorrectly using child constant in class property).
  • Fixed bug #63914 (zend_do_fcall_common_helper_SPEC does not handle exceptions properly).
  • Fixed bug #62343 (Show class_alias In get_declared_classes()).

    • PCRE:

  • Merged PCRE 8.32.

    • SNMP:

  • Fixed bug #61981 (OO API, walk: $suffix_as_key is not working correctly).

    • Zip:

  • Fixed bug #64452 (Zip crash intermittently). (Anatol)

    • Those who are still on version 5.3, the team has released a smaller update (version 5.3.24) with a number of bug fixes. It also includes the same PCRE library merge that was included in the latest version of PHP 5.4, as well as the same Zip crash bug.

    Core:

  • Fixed bug #64370 (microtime(true) less than $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT’]).
  • Fixed bug #63914 (zend_do_fcall_common_helper_SPEC does not handle exceptions properly).
  • Fixed bug #62343 (Show class_alias In get_declared_classes()).

    • PCRE:

  • Merged PCRE 8.32.

    • mysqlnd:

  • Fixed bug #63530 (mysqlnd_stmt::bind_one_parameter crashes, uses wrong alloc for stmt->param_bind).

    • DateTime:

  • Fixed bug #62852 (Unserialize Invalid Date causes crash).

    • Zip:

  • Fixed bug #64452 (Zip crash intermittently).

    • If you want to the source code for either version 5.4.14 or 5.3.24, you can grab it here. If you need PHP for Windows, you can grab the latest versions here.

  • Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    For the past few years, Mozilla has been working on a project called Open Badges. You can think of the project like merit badges for the Internet. It allows people to prove that they have accomplished something, or are knowledgeable in a topic, in a visual format. Now after a year of extensive beta testing, the finished product is finally ready.

    Mozilla announced today that Open Badges 1.0 is ready for public use. The first release of Open Badges will be focused on three areas:

  • earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
  • give recognition for things you teach
  • show your badges in the places that matter.

    • Right from the start, Open Badges users will be able to prove their worth with badges from over 600 organizations. Mozilla itself offer a wide range of badges, including badges for Web development. Other organizations offering badges include the Girl Scouts and NASA.

    For a more in-depth breakdown of what Open Badges offer, the Mozilla blog explains:

    Knits skills together. Through the Open Badges shared standard, badges for the same skill-set can connect and build on one another — whether they’re issued by the same organization or many different ones. Individuals can earn badges that recognize learning and skills from multiple sources both online and offline — from learning HTML with Mozilla, to volunteering and leadership skills with Girl Scouts, to learning introductory robotics and engineering with NASA.

    Full of information. With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements.

    Can go anywhere on the web. The Open Badges backpack gives users an easy way to collect their badges, sort them by category, and display them across social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.

    Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here.

    Free, open to anyone, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors. The open source model means improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

    If you want to start working with Open Badges, you should start with the developer community. After that, check out the source code and contribute to its development. Open Badges has an opportunity to change how we learn and earn accomplishments on the Web, but it won’t be able to do anything if it doesn’t have the support of the open source community.

  • ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Now Available

    The world of Web development is changing rapidly. To keep up, Microsoft has been making incremental changes to ASP.NET. The latest update to the framework brings changes and additions to every member of the ASP.NET family.

    Micrososft recently released ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 to the general coding public. The release contains new templates and tooling ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and the rest of the ASP.NET family. Microsoft put together a little video to go over what’s in the latest release:

    If you don’t like watching informative videos, here’s a quick rundown of the new features in this latest release. First, Web Forms got a a new FriendlyURL package that adds the following benefits:

  • It automatically maps URLs to ASPX pages
  • It automatically passes route values to controls with a nice bindable syntax

    • The ASP.NET Web API gets the following three new features:

  • Automatic Help Page generation.
  • Tracing – Everything in the pipeline is output to the System.Diagnostics.Trace, so you can read it in the Visual Studio output window as well as any registered Trace Listener.
  • OData – Lots of new stuff here, including routing and query validation

    • ASP.NET MVC gets a few new templates and the following three features:

  • The Facebook template makes it easy to create full Facebook apps. Your users log in on Facebook, approve your requests to access their Facebook content, and then your app can interact with their social graph.
  • There’s a lightweight Single Page Application template based on Knockout.js and ASP.NET Web API.
  • We’ve made it possible to create new ASP.NET MVC templates using a Visual Studio extension (VSIX). Expect to see a lot more templates from us and others in the community!

    • As for Web Tools, here’s some of the highlights that you’ll see in practice in the above video:

  • Page Inspector now has live sync, so when you update CSS you’ll see it update immediately.
  • There’s IntelliSense support for Knockout bindings, CoffeeScript, and more.
  • The integrated publishing includes single file publish and compare. That means that you can edit a single file and push it out, or even compare your local changes against the live production version.

    • You can grab this latest release of ASP.NET and any future release over at the official Web site.

  • Tips On Building A Better Web Site From The Pros

    On February 9, developers from all over the world converged on London for the Edge Conference. The show hosted a number of talks, featuring developers from Facebook, Google, Mozilla and more. The focus was on Web technologies and how to take advantage of these new tools to increase performance on Web sites.

    While there were seven talks at this year’s Edge Conference, Google has only gotten around to uploading the first three. These are all important issues, however, and Web developers would be wise to check them out. You might even learn a few new things on how to make your Web site faster, more stable and more accessible.

  • SignalR Is The Latest And Greatest Tool Available To ASP.NET Developers

    In November, Microsoft announced a number of features coming to its ASP.NET Web application framework over the next few months. One of the more prominent announcements was SignalR, a feature that adds “real-time functionality to Web applications using WebSockets and other down-level transports.” It’s available as a Release Candidate , but a Microsoft blogger is already showing off some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of it.

    Microsoft blogger, Mike Brind, recently posted a pretty extensive tutorial on his blog that goes into how developers will want to use SignalR in building ASP.NET Web pages with WebMatrix. First things first, however, he explains what SignalR is and what the new library can to accomplish:

    The web works on a Request-Response model. Browsers and other user agents make requests and web server provide a response to that request.The response is sent to the delivery address provided in the request by the user agent. And that is the natural order of things on the Web – servers can’t make responses without a request. For the most part, this is not an issue, but if you want to display real-time updates on your web page, you have needed to resort to techniques like repeatedly polling the server using AJAX to see if any changes had been made to data. Alternatively, you could use Comet technology, which keeps a persistent connection open between the server and the client. HTML5 introduced two new techniques – Server Sent Events and WebSockets. SignalR is a user-friendly wrapper around all these technologies that makes it a lot easier to create applications that require the real-time display of data. SignalR utilises HTML5 Web Sockets API where it is available, and falls back onto other technologies where they are not – Server Sent Events, Forever Frames or Long Polling, the last two of which are Comet techniques.

    Brind suggests that any interested developer obtain the prerelease version of SignalR via Visual Studio. He suggests using the Package Manager Console and installing it via the Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR -Pre command.

    From there, Brind explains the basics of SignalR including how you set up an application that uses the library. He says that an application is powered by a hub, which holds some similarities with a Controller in ASP.NET MVC. Those familiar with that should have little to no problem adopting SignalR into their own applications.

    For the rest of the post, Brind gets into the nitty gritty of the code required to implement SignalR into your ASP.NET Web pages. His first example shows how to create a Chat window on a Web page using SignalR. The second example is a little more complicated as he combines SignalR with Knockout to create a simple product listing page where users can view details about individual products.

    You can check out both of Brind’s examples at his GitHub page, and get refreshed on all the latest changes to SignalR at the official Web site.

  • HTML5 Is Now Feature Complete, W3C To Start Focusing On Interoperability

    HTML5 Is Now Feature Complete, W3C To Start Focusing On Interoperability

    Many people will tell you that HTML5 is the future, while others will say that it’s not going to happen. The biggest proponent of and main architect behind HTML5, the World Wide Web Consortium, insist that HTML5 is the future, and its latest advancement only further helps to prove that point.

    The W3C recently published the “complete definition of HTML5 and Canvas 2D applications.” These are not W3C standards just yet, but it represents a major step forward for the Web technology. Those who were on the fence can now start developing for HTML5 in earnest as a stable version is now available.

    HTML5 may be stable and feature complete, but the W3C is not yet done with the Web standard. The group says that browser fragmentation still remains a problem with some browsers lagging behind others in terms of HTML5 adoption. The group’s new goal is to make sure HTML5 is interoperable across every browser. They hope to have this completed by the middle of 2014 and then it will publish its final HTML5 recommendation.

    A number of W3C members spoke out on this tremendous milestone. All express excitement that HTML5 is ready for its biggest debut yet. Here’s some of the more interesting testimonials with promises of a better future for all on the Web.

    Danny Winokur, Vice President and General Manager of Adobe Interactive Development, spoke on HTML5’s impact on the company’s recent introduction of its Edge Web tools:

    The completion of the HTML5 and Canvas specifications is an important milestone for developers and designers as it provides a common foundation for browsers and other implementations. Web standards are central to Adobe’s Edge Tools & Services for authoring rich interactive web media and animations, helping us deliver a more predictable and reliable user experience for anyone creating content and applications for the modern web. We congratulate the working group for their efforts in advancing both specifications.

    Tobie Langel, W3C Advisory Committee Representative for Facebook, spoke on the social network’s tight relationship with the Web technology:

    HTML5 plays a fundamental role in making Facebook accessible to the more than one billion people who use our products. Building with the latest web technologies is how we are able to make our experience available across more than 7,000 devices. Today’s announcement is an important milestone for the Open Web Platform. Facebook is proud to contribute to this effort through involvement in initiatives like the Coremob Community Group.

    Jean Paoli, President of Microsoft Open Technologies, spoke on Microsoft’s commitment to implementing HTML5 technologies in its products:

    Microsoft is proud to have participated in the hard work that has made HTML5 and Canvas 2D Candidate Recommendations, and congratulates W3C on reaching this important milestone. We look forward to working with the Web community to finalize these as W3C Recommendations. Several Microsoft products have implemented these emerging open Web standards to bring interoperability and maximum reach across multiple devices. We’re confident that HTML5 and Canvas 2D are ready for wide adoption, and glad that the industry shares our enthusiasm for HTML5.1 that will soon support better graphics and streaming media in an open way.

    It will be interesting to see how other players in the Web ecosystem approach HTML5 now that it’s “feature complete.” I know a few developers who have stuck to Flash and other plugin-based Web technologies because HTML5 just wasn’t good enough for them yet. It’s unknown if this will increase HTML5 adoption across the Web.

  • Mozilla Launches Developer Toolbar In Firefox 16

    Mozilla has launched a new feature with Firefox 16 called the Developer Toolbar, which comes with what Mozilla calls the Developer Command Line. This is designed to provide easy keyboard control over Firefox developer tools, and it completes commands and parameters for you.

    “In addition, Firefox unprefixes a number of stable features including: CSS3 Animations, Transitions, Transforms, Image Values, IndexedDB and Values and Units,” Mozilla says in a blog post. “Firefox also unprefixes Battery API and Vibration API, two Web APIs that Mozilla helped create.”

    “On mobile, Firefox for Android introduces Reader Mode to make it easier to view, read and share articles and stories from your mobile phone or tablet,” Mozilla adds. “Simply tap the ‘Reader’ icon in the Awesome Bar to activate. This feature provides an enjoyable and clutter-free way to read online content by removing advertisements, reformatting pictures and increasing font size.”

    The toolbar will also show you the errors on a page if there are any. It displays an error indicator next to the web console.

    Simply press shift+F2 to bring the toolbar up.

  • Google, Apple and Others Team Up To Promote Web Standards

    Google, Apple and Others Team Up To Promote Web Standards

    In some ways, the Web is like the lawless Wild West that you see in movies and television. There are no rules or standards for how things operate. Some organizations like W3C have tried to bring some form of order to the Web, but there’s not been a huge concentrated effort on the part of Web companies to standardize the Web. That all changes today.

    Google, Apple, Facebook and others have announced the immediate availability of Web Platform Docs. It’s only an alpha release for now, but its intentions are nothing short of grandiose. Google says that Web Platform Docs will be a “community-driven site that aims to become the comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation.”

    The first release today is comprised of submissions from the Web Platform Stewards. These are the large companies that have contributed code, tutorials and more to help people create the future of the Web across all browsers. W3C started the site, but other parties like Facebook, HP and Nokia have submitted content for this first release.

    Web Platform Docs is hoping to put the future of Web development in the hands of those who are in the digital trenches day in and day out. These are the people who are constantly innovating the Web and Web Platform Docs gives them a voice to share their knowledge with those who may be just starting or are stuck on a particularly devious bit of code.

    The Web is a pretty wild place, and it will never be fully tamed. Web Platform Docs will hopefully cut down on a number of compatibility and formatting errors that still plague the Web. It may even get more people involved in Web development which can only be a good thing.