A couple of interesting developments in the sphere of web development have come to light lately. One that caught my eye was the development of JSLT as an alternative to XSLT. The ajaxian blog has a lot more detail on the subject but as you can see below the syntax alone is quite different, just how performant it is in the real world is yet to be seen.

one clarification that should be made though is that JSLT is an alternative to XSLT not an implementation of XSLT in javascript. Rik Arends (the creator of JSLT) describes what it does:

“
JSLT parses/tokenizes all javascript-code and processes it for macros and language extensions recursively, maintaining proper nesting.
                                                            “

Coming from the same stable as the Prototype Window framework the Prototype Graphic Framework promises to deliver vector drawing to the browser in an easy to use library. The framework has renderers for SVG, Canvas and VML though the Canvas version still needs a bit of work.
More details and link available from the Ajaxian blog entry.

I fully intended to watch the entire webcast last night but unforseen technical issues with my home office pc meant I dropped out shortly after it started. Thankfully the webcast is available for download. The Public sector developer weblog has the links available. Note: I was asked for registration details again whenI downloaded it this morning so be prepared to use your live login or register to download.

Catching up on the Ajaxian Blog I found a post covering Jack D Herrington’s article on 5 Ajax anti patterns. The article covers 5 pitfalls of coding Ajax and reasons to avoid or at the very leats think carefully before implementing.

It’s a very well written article (IMHO) and worth a read.

Topics covered include:

• Invalid use of timers.
• Not inspecting return results in the callback.
• Passing Complex XML when HTML would be better.
• Passing XML when you should pass JavaScript Code.
• Doing too much on the server.

Vista has been out a while now and we’ve all seen the ads and I’m sure some of us have had a WOW moment along the line somewhere. Mine was when I looked at the price tag ;0)

It seems with every new OS microsoft brings out there is a hardware price tag to be paid sometimes we benefit from it sometimes it’s just a burden. Vista as we know, requires a pretty powerful GFX card and ideally 512 meg or ram or more on that card. This article on arstechnica.com goes a long way to explaining why its important and just how different Vista is to windows XP in respect to the visual elements.

It’s a long but fascinating read, resonably technical but enlightening.

I think it’s worth the time to read through, at the very least you’ll get a bit more understanding of the excitement Microsoft developers and evangelists have been radiating in the build up to Vista.

As I’ve said before, I’m going to give it a couple more months and then when I upgrade my hardware I’ll likely go Vista. Soon as I can I’ll be looking to get a copy of the 64 bit release onto my laptop again.