Web development is an industry that’s in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday.
In this series, published monthly, we’ll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump!
News and Releases
All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla.
Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time
I admit I saw this coming but never so quickly. Chrome has overtaken Firefox in global marketshare. Chrome accounts for 25.69% of the user pie while Firefox is at 25.23%.
Chrome’s number has been increasing lately, overtaking Firefox in the UK, for example. This month, though, sees it leading Firefox for the first time on a global scale. Congrats to the Chrome team!
Facebook Creates HipHop VM to Improve Performance with PHP
It’s no secret that Facebook utilizes PHP on the backend to serve its multi-billion pageviews a month service. PHP’s ease of use has also lead to dismal performance and inability to scale.
In the past, Facebook resorted to optimizing the Zend engine but later went with creating their own PHP interpreter. The new HipHop VM is just another step towards making their PHP codebase run faster.
SOPA Protests Wash Over the Internet
I don’t wish to editorialize the contents and ramifications of SOPA so it’s best you read up on the Wikipedia page linked below.
Internet users and services worldwide, however, have organized widespread protests in opposition of this bill with the backing of internet giants like the Wikimedia foundation and Mozilla. If you live in the US, do write to your local representatives!
Dojo 1.7 Released
Version 1.7 of Dojo got released early this month with substantial improvements including a lot of API changes under the hood.
Make sure to hit the link below for more information. And if you’re looking to gain mastery over Dojo, make sure to check out our session on the topic.
SproutCore 2.0 Gets Renamed. And Renamed Again, For Good Measure
I love Sproutcore and tend to use it in a lot of my experiments. The framework has been moving steadily towards version 2.0 and was renamed to Amber.js in the process. Due to a naming collision, with Smalltalk people no less, SproutCore 2.0 is now officially Ember.js
If you’re curious as to the rationale behind all this renaming, you can find a lot more at the link below.
WordPress 3.3 is Now Live
The WordPress juggernaut rolls on with version 3.3 codenamed ‘Sonny’. The version ships with, to quote the devs themselves, “significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports”.
WP.Tuts+ has a great overview of the new version, if you’re interested. Also, remember to check out the sweet, short video at the link below.
Sencha Fiddle is Out
Sencha Fiddle is an IDE that lets you start creating mobile applications through your browser. Even though it’s not finished yet, the features already in place are great and work well.
Rails Hits 4.0 Beta
The Rails master branch has officially hit the 4.0 beta mark. Big changes here include dropping support for Ruby 1.8.7. If you’re running the older version of Ruby, stick to the 3.x branch and hang tight for 3.2 to be released!
Arduino 1.0 Released
And to get slightly nerdy, Arduino has finally hit version 1.0. If you’re unsure as to what Arduino is, it’s a microcontroller which you can program through the Arduino environment.
Version 1 brings a lot of changes including API changes, new classes and much more. You can get to the release notes directly here.
New Kids on the Block
As web developers, the sheer amount of resources we can tap into increases exponentially with time. Here is just a quick look at some recently created resources that deserve your attention — everything from new books to scripts and frameworks.
stopcensorship.js
Use this script on your site to protest censorship of the Internet.
After the page is loaded the script randomly censors text on the page by replacing the text with black bars. It also places a black bar at the top of the page with a link to http://americancensorship.org/. Viewers can remove censoring for the current session by clicking on the “Remove this” link.
Sinatra::Synchrony
Sinatra::Synchrony is a small extension for Sinatra that dramatically improves the concurrency of your web application. Powered by EventMachine and EM-Synchrony, it increases the number of clients your application can serve per process when you have a lot of traffic and slow IO calls (like HTTP calls to external APIs).
jQuery Gantt Chart
jQuery Gantt Chart is a simple chart that implements gantt functionality as
a jQuery component. It’s able to page results and read JSON data amongst a ton of other features.
Create
Create, from the Midgard Project is a comprehensive web editing interface for Content Management Systems. It is designed to provide a modern, fully browser-based HTML5 environment for managing content. Create can be adapted to work on almost any content management backend.
Rickshaw
Rickshaw is a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.
nanoScroller.js
nanoScroller.js is a jQuery plugin that offers a simplistic way of implementing Lion-styled scrollbars for your website. It uses minimal HTML markup and the latest version utilizes native scrolling and works with the iPad, iPhone, and some Android Tablets.
bootbox.js
Enter bootbox.js – alert() and confirm() like behaviour using twitter’s modal dialog boxes.
Broadway
A JavaScript H.264 and VP8/WebM decoder.
gitdocs
Open-source dropbox alternative powered by git. Collaborate on files and tasks without any extra hassle. gitdocs will automatically keep everyone’s repos in sync by pushing and pulling changes. This allows any git repo to be used as a collaborative task list, file share, or wiki for a team. Supports a web front-end allowing each repo to be accessed through your browser.
Best of the Internet
Often, you’re not really looking for a tutorial as much as you’re looking for a rant, an opinion or the musings of a tired developer or just something cool with absolutely zero real world use. This sections contains links to precisely those — interesting and cool stuff from the developer community.
Why HTML5 Media is not Enough
Amos Wenger on why the media elements introduced with the HTML5 spec aren’t evolving fast enough and how he’s countering the issues he’s facing.
What Tools Developers Actually Use
A great inforgraphic charting out the tools that developers use and love. There isn’t too much data here but should give you a quick overview as to what your peers are using.
Backbone.js Fundamentals
Addy Osmani is back again with a great little ebook on working with Backbone.js. The content goes over every aspect of the Backbone framework so if you’re even remotely interested in working with it, this is a great place to start.
Cracks in the Foundation
A clear, concise look at what’s wrong with the PHP platform. If you’re a PHP user, prepare to go in with some denial.
Wrapping Up
Well, that’s about all the major changes that happened in our industry lately.
Do you want us to cover more standard news? A focus on upcoming scripts maybe? Or just more interesting posts and discussions from the community? Let us know in the comments and thank you so much for reading!
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By Siddharth
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Great post for whats new on the end month of the year… thanks a lot Mr. Siddhart
thank you sid!
Thanks for all the information. :)
You need to fix the link to “Backbone.js Fundementals” though. I think there is an unnecessary “g” at the beginning and end of the url.
Fixed, thanks!
Thought I would add this into the mix:
https://bitbucket.org/valordigital/dotvee
“dotVee is an attempt to make a micro-language that is compiled by a parser hand written in PHP into PHP code and then executed by PHP…”
Very nice article, an interesting wrap up to the december news…
A thing I noticed, the link featured in the segment about “Backbone” has an extra G at the beggining and one extra at the end, not that big of a thing thou :)
Greetings from Uruguay, and Happy New Year
I’m not very bright. :( Fixed now.
is there is any Microsoft related webdev news? i.e., ASP.NET
i think from the first edition itself i didn’t see any news under asp.net :(
cool, Nice articles and wish i can find more here.
great post.
SOPA is probably the most important ongoing piece of legislation because of all the controversy surrounding it. I like hearing about the companies that are going against SOPA like godaddy.com, (from massive boycotts), and scribd.com. It gives them free publicity but contributes to media coverage, which is helpful in promoting reform.
Visit my blog: http://www.blur-graphics.com/wordpress/
Actually, until Friday GoDaddy was in support of SOPA, they only turned against it because of a massive number of former customers boycotting the company and moving their domains elsewhere as a result of their support
PHP definitely needs a new logo :O
WordPress 3.3 is “Sonny”, not “Sunny”. Although, it is opening us up to even brighter horizons!
Cheers Siddharth, and keep these posts up, please!
You didn’t mention Opera 11.60!
Completely new HTML5 parser – claimed to fix ~20% of website incompatibility bugs with Opera, and my experience has verified that statistic.
Full EcmaScript 5.1 support
Mail UI overhaul and memory usage reduction
More HTML5 & CSS3 support added…actually a CSS4 feature was added too!
Speculative parsing – speeds up web pages with lots of resources like scripts and stylesheets
…and more!
This is only a minor release – version 12.00 is coming next year with HWA/WebGL and more sweetness that is currently unknown.
Here’s 11.60′s “changelog Christmas carol”. Very geeky – you’ll love it! :)
Great post tho decembar wasnt that interesting for web developers world, nothing major happend, except chrome taking over mozilla.
Good Post!!
awesome post Sid.
I have learn more from here
Thank You
this is great site to have ..nice blog..
we discover what you need in web site solution and web development.