Browser Stats

I don't know about everyone else out there, but I am becoming increasing frustrated with having to test web sites in IE6

Surely it is time to call it a day and banish it to browser heaven? The latest browser usage stats from w3schools show it is on a steady decline and now Chrome has been up for a couple of months we can see how it is performing.

Geek out time...

2008	IE7	IE6	Chrome	Fx	Moz	S	O
October	26.9%	20.2%	3.0%	44.0%	0.4%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%	3.1%	42.6%	0.5%	2.7%	2.0%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
August	26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%	0.3%	42.6%	0.5%	2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%	0.7%	2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%	0.9%	2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%	1.1%	2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%	1.2%	2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%	1.3%	1.9%	1.4%

Making the case for Visual Studio 2008

A big part of any successful organisation is ensuring that all expenditure is justified in terms of the expected ROI.  With this in mind I recently went in seek of documentation to support my development teams request to upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio.  What I didn't expect was to find that Microsoft had already done the hard work for me.   

Microsoft have created a section on their site highlighting all the benefits of using the latest version of Visual Studio 2008.  More importantly however they have created a document for developers to present to senior management outlining in business terms, the top 5 reasons for investing in the upgraded version.

I think this is an excellent approach that all companies can learn from.  Firstly it allows the service provider to control the message being presented to senior management.  Secondly it makes it easy for individuals in the client organisation to champion your product or service on your behalf.  Few of us have the time required to write detailed cost benefit analysis's,  so having these provided increases the likelihood of a successful business case being made.

You can read the full business benefits of Visual Studio 2008 here.

Azure by Microsoft

Windows Azure, the new cloud computing platform from Microsoft provides users with storage, networking and computational power. Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, said that Microsoft would help developers build the next generation of applications that are able to span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter.

He also added that "The Azure Services Platform gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business."

Microsoft has opened datacenters in Quincy, Washington and San Antonio with plans to build additional datacenters in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland. The Azure Services Platform uses internet standards such as HTTP, REST, WS and AtomPub (Atom Publishing Protocol). Some of the services included in Windows Azure are Microsoft SQL services, Microsoft .net services, Live services for the sharing of data across PC’s, phones and websites.

Google cares about our Web security!

Weak Web application security has become a high threat for companies, not to mention the embarrassment that goes along with it and could potentially mean the loss of very important data and ultimately the loss of millions of Pounds.   

Feeling paranoid all of a sudden? Don’t, because Web application design has just become a lot safer, or so Google says, after they announced the public release of Ratproxy. Ratproxy is one of Google’s internal tool’s that is used for testing of security of Web-Applications.

Ratproxy, Released under an Apache 2.0 software license, scan’s and looks for a variety of problems with in the Web-Application code. The new tool can pick out snippets of JavaScript from style sheets and it also supports SSL (Secure Socket Layer) scanning.

The program basically highlights all areas of concern, which are not all necessarily indicative of actual security flaws, during a testing session. It’s then the job of a security professional to run through the list of gathered security concerns and then decide which are of real concern to the application.

For more information, read the overview posted of Ratproxy by Google or download the source code if you want to give it a test.

JavaScript Libraries

JavaScript has recently become the world's most popular programming language. And so, with more and more people using it, the question of which is the best JavaScript Library is now more important than ever. So here, without further ado, are some of my (almost certainly biased) opinions.

JavaScript

JavaScript is most commonly used as a client-side scripting language for browsers - bringing web pages to life with online delights such as animated menus and sliding text - and it can certainly be a frustrating beast to use.

This is because each different browser (e.g.: FireFox, Opera and of course the infamous Internet Explorer), and in some cases even different versions of the same browser, parses the language differently, so code that works in one browser will not necessarily work in another. Which in turn means that without outside help you end up having to pretty much write your code several times over - once for each browser.

Enter JavaScript libraries!

JavaScript libraries

JavaScript libraries cater for this by providing a new set of functions and controls which take care of the different implementations for you, providing a useful abstraction layer and meaning you only have to write your code once.

There are many different libraries out there and each works in a different way and provides a different set of functions. Very few of the libraries extend or collaborate with any of the others, so as a JavaScript developer you have to choose which one you like best, which can be a daunting prospect considering the number of different options.

Recommendations

I am now going to give my opinions on which are the best. These will not be entirely fair. I haven't looked into each library in depth, and a lot of my opinions will be based on something I heard once somewhere, so they shouldn't be taken as gospel. That said I have been fiddling around with different JavaScript libraries for a while now and JavaScript for a lot longer so my opinion may still be worth something.

Libraries that didn't quite make the grade

Yahoo Interface Library's is well written but the namespacing and separate files are cumbersome, and in any case it's been superseded by Ext 2.0. Ext 2.0 is extensive and fast but huge to download and not so good for facilitating development, and so only really suitable for intranets or people with very fast internet connections. Dojo is quite well spoken of, but once again it seems quite cumbersome to implement its many different packages.

Prototype is very popular, but I read somewhere (although haven't checked myself yet) that it doesn't follow good DOM principles and I really am one for principles, so that was out the window.

Rico seems outdated by many accounts, and MochiKit seems fine but not quite as good as my favourites. The other libraries just haven't been mentioned enough to really catch my attention.

So, on to my favourites.

My favourite libraries

jQuery is the library I recommend for the casual JavaScript user or any JavaScript beginners:

It seems to be very quickly gathering momentum. There are now a huge amount of sites using it, most notably Google Code. It has a huge development community and many contributed modules and it is well documented and easy to use. It also tries its best to be usable with other libraries.

MooTools is my recommendation for the more advanced JavaScripter (I would say if you are at the point of actually creating objects in JavaScript you fall into this category). It's very small and light but covers all the bases to build applications from that I can think if. And does that pretty solidly. Its Class class is extremely useful, and I have found everything it does to be impressively robust and well thought out. It has very strong programming principles, which are clear in the way the library is designed to encourage good programming practice.

Despite singling out these two libraries as the best I do have suggestions and criticisms of both, which I will cover in my next article (coming soon): Criticisms of jQuery and MooTools.

JavaScript and CSS test page

As a precursor to a blog entry (coming soon) on Mootools vs jQuery I was just about to start playing around with both JavaScript libraries a couple of weeks ago. To do this I started writing myself a really quick HTML page to test them in (<html><body></body></html> sort of thing), when it occurred to me that I must have done exactly the same thing about twenty times before to experiment with various JavaScript and CSS functions.

So, I decided that this time I'd spend a bit longer and write a really multi-purpose test page that I could use over and over again. It took me about half an hour, but I think it was probably worth it. It is valid XHTML 1.1, contains (commented out) links to Mootools & jQuery JavaScript libraries as well as Eric Meyer's and YUI's CSS reset stylesheets so that you can easily include these if you wish.

It also contains many different type of elements (h1, h2, paragraph, unordered list, ordered list, table...) all with appropriate ids and classes so they can be easily linked into with CSS and JavaScript. This is pretty much everything I can think of that someone would want in an HTML page to play around with JavaScript and CSS, but if you want anything else it can of course be easily added.

If you do end up using it, please comment to tell me what you think :)

And here it is: Download index.html!

Cheers,
Robin.

The future of CAPTCHAs?

The purpose of a captcha is affectively to stop spammers filling out forms online and flooding your inbox with untold tripe! KittenAuth is a new, novel and much more fun thing to do than trying to dycpher an group of letters in a box.

It's relativetively easy for a computer to work out CAPTCHA these days.

So instead why not "Click all foals then click submit" before filling out your next form - Genius!

The great internet clean up starts

Address overhaul begins

It was stated in a report that all of the master address books on the internet will be tidied up and updated in the first major step to overhaul and streamline the internet's core addressing system.

The new format is commonly known as IP version 6 (IPv6) and the updates and maintenance play a vital part in ensuring that the massive pool of unallocated internet addresses is not exhausted by 2011.

We use words and letters to navigate the web, but our machines use only numbers and your computer will try to access the numerical equivalent for the site you are searching for and these numbers are acquired from the net's master address book.

The latest developments have seen the birth of IPv6 and will be an upgrade on its predecessor IPv4. The upgrade will mostly consist of adding a small number of records into the new IPv6 records on master and root servers.

This a huge step forward in internet development, because for the first time pc's and servers will be able to communicate without using IPv4 technology at all.

Paul Twomey, the president of Icann (they oversee the addressing system) told the BBC website that : "There's pressure for people to make the conversion to IPv6, we're pushing this as a major issue."

The main reason for this is the fact that all of the unallocated addresses on IPv4, some 4,294,967,296, is decreasing fast.

He also added that, "we're down to 14% of the unallocated addresses out of the whole pool for version 4," and he concluded that "There's not a Y2K problem per se, but there's going to be a crush so we need to get people applying for them now."

When IPv6 becomes effective, we will unlock a virtually infinite pool of addresses to use. The take up of IPv6 is expected to increase as people that will try to register IPv4 addresses will simply have to deal with the fact that their might not be any sites left in a couple of years.