Javascript News & Articles

Mashups may be all the rage, but can expose the enterprise to all manner of security risks. Enter the OpenAjax Alliance (news, site) and its new standard for more secure mashing.

Packt Publishing (news, link) has released its first book published through RAW (Read as we Write) program, where customers read pre-publication chapters and offer comments before the book goes to press. The RAW experiment could offer an interesting publishing model at a time when many publishers are struggling to survive.

CEO Sridhar Vembu of Zoho wrote an interesting article about why the Zoho suite is AJAX-rich as opposed to Flash-heavy. For those of you who still think AJAX killed the info-architect, it makes for nice reading.

Vembu prefaces the post by stating Flash is a great tool for other stuff (like ToonDoo, par exemple). But for the Zoho suite, the flexible nature of Javascript simply serves users better.

Who doesn’t love AJAX? It alters a site’s content without users having to reload. It’s rendered the pageview virtually worthless, inspiring Nielsen/BuzzMetrics to pursue a time-based site tracking model for calculating the popularity of sites. And in many ways, its availability is one manner of gauging the hip-with-it-ness of a site.

As with any snazzy and hype-ridden new technology, there is reason to take caution.

Google is working on a new AJAX API that will enable the good user — that’s you — to post feeds to your web properties with just a wee bit of simple JavaScript.

Those who’ve tried weathering the storm of server-side feed grabbing and caching issues and the labyrinthine depths of parsing XML know what a welcome pairing this is.