April 8th, 2009 | Published in Uncategorized
I have just made a independent study on “deep linking for AJAX” for the course Web 2.0 technology. Seems that most of the info on the web about deep linking implementation are for Flash web site but not AJAX’s, so I release my report and presentation slide here hoping can help somebody.
March 27th, 2009 | Published in Uncategorized
Recently JavaScript and CSS is becoming more and more powerful. Like the experiment shown in Chrome Experiment, we can see that the browser is now really capable to handle all those texts, images and animations (at least in the near future, since there is still IE need to catch up). But yes, multimedia means not only these three but also sound and video. As I can see there is no really “standard” way to handle that currently.
It is funny that sound and video can only be presented in a web page with the help of plug-ins. For videos, most of them are served by Flash Player, like YouTube and Vimeo. And very popular among the design agencies and artists, mov files are used, which presented by Quicktime player. Without the plug-ins, no browser can show video. Sound is most likely embed in Flash and actually not many website make use of sounds (I’m not talking about those annoying background music okay?).
I don’t understand why the browsers/web standards seem to be not interested to have native support of sound and video. If they care about those animations, image manipulations, round corners, vector graphics etc., they should support sound and video too.
Actually I have an idea, seems so crazy but it works – making Flash player built into the browser. Maybe not using Adobe’s Flash Player, if anybody mind that is not open source, or Adobe crazily disallow to do so. But there are other open source ones, like Gnash and swfdec, although they may not support all the features but better than nothing.
What do you think?
March 12th, 2009 | Published in Uncategorized
JavaScript performance is becoming more and more critical since we are all obsessed with developing CPU-hungry stuff like pixastic (manipulate image in JavaScript), Box2D.js (2D physic simulation). Sometime these computational expensive calculations will block the user from interacting with the UI and freeze the screen. So, some developer start asking for multi-threading in JavaScript.
Multi-threading is a technology that let a program split into several threads and let them run in parallel. For example the visual part including the UI is running in one thread and some other work like zipping a file is run in another thread. In that case the UI will not need to wait for the zipping process and able to respond to user input.
Sadly, this is not implemented in JavaScript (or we should say not implemented in the browsers?). But there are still some developers finding ways to simulate multi-threading. Although the tricks may not really solve the problem completely, but still are very useful to be learned. Here are two of them:
And recently, there is a threading library for Flex, which use similar techniques as above to simulate threading.