Html5

jQuery Offline is yet another new project from the seemingly unstoppable Yehuda Katz. This one provides wrappers around jQuery’s JSON fetching functions that will cache initial responses and hit the cache if your user is offline. When coupled with Rack Offline this seems like the start of a very simple way to develop javascript heavy apps that survive a loss of connectivity, leaving the developer to focus on the trickier stuff like synchronising changes made by multiple users. ...

A few bits and pieces that have crossed my browser in the past couple of weeks (though mostly sifted through yesterday). The NoSQL (or LessSQL) movement has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, but numerous people have pointed out that MySQL can be adapted to cover many of the most common use-cases. Flickr’s Kellan kicked off a series of posts on that topic with Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr and Richard Crowley responded with OpenDNS MySQL abuses. On the other side of the coin, Luke Melia has a write-up of how he uses Redis to build a “who’s online now list” and Sean Cribbs’ (fairly convincing) Why Riak should power your next Rails app is worth a read even if you’re not a ruby developer. ...

MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts. As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story ...

It’s time for me to take another stab at occasional link blogging. While I really appreciate those who blog individual links, I seem to keep coming back to ways of packaging links. Here’s a first installment for 2010: Last month may have been the time for advent calendars—with Drew’s 24ways yet again containing many excellent articles that have me very excited about HTML5—but the jQuery team have decided to follow a similar model in the run up to the release of version 1.4. jQuery14.com kicks off on January 14th, but already has details of their new API website based on the contents of the jQuery Reference Guide. ...