The Break Down
All three of these companies have decided to give webmail a “fresh spin”:
Microsoft and Yahoo are poised to make Web-based e-mail more powerful than ever with updates that bring a desktop-style interface to their respective Web mail offerings.
We tested betas (currently invitation-only) of Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail, and also looked at an open-source newcomer called Zimbra.
All three apps use an increasingly popular programming technique called Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to improve on standard Web mail and even Google’s Gmail.
Yahoo is adding some keyboard functionality. Control and Shift keys to select multiple messages; PgUP and PgDN to scroll through messages; and they do have an interesting feature where multiple messages can be opened in the same window.
Microsoft is basically making Windows Live Mail into a sort of Hotmail on steroids. It’s basically going to be Outlook from the browser.
Zimbra, although a little rougher (give them a break, they’re new), does look more promising in my view. Check out their online demo here. They’re not into the personal email accounts thing. Their suite is aimed at cooperations and businesses and goes way beyond just email. They can also integrate a company’s own database into this making ordering, for example, painless.
Posted in Ajax, General.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 24, 2005
Since the boom of Ajax a couple months ago, a lot of developers have been riding the wave. But there are somethings that you need to keep in mind. You can’t just go totally Ajax-crazy unless it suits your particular needs. If you are still developing a “Website” (in the purest sense), that is going to be open to the public and something you need traffic to the entire site cannot and should not be totally Ajax.
Tom Taulli at Forbes.com points this out.
“A complete AJAX application would be a mistake because search engines won’t be able to index it. And without a search engine, a site won’t be able to sell products.”
Thus, a better approach would be to sprinkle AJAX features within the application; not make it a complete AJAX application.
This is totally true, seeing that Ajax (without the necessary hacks) does not change anything on the address bar, and you can’t usually access certain portions of the application directly through the browser’s URL.
Posted in Ajax.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 23, 2005
In what can only be described as very embarrassing Mamboserver has been hacked.
The open source content management system that lost it’s entire development team and the vast majority of the community not so long ago has today had it’s web site defaced.
read more.
I really think this is it for Mambo. But my one problem is that people seemed to be getting the wrong idea. Joomla and Mambo had the same core as of a couple days ago. It’s not that Joomla is so much better than Mambo. Joomla has had some minor updates since the split, but there were essentially the same. So people saying that Mambo is vulnerable and not Joomla is not a viable statement.
The Joomla team, however, did take this as an opportunity to release Joomla! 1.0.4 [ Sundial ].
Posted in Joomla.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 22, 2005
Joomla! 1.0.4 [ Sundial ] is out today. It covers a number of security issues:
Critical Level Threats
- Potentional XSS injection through GET and other variables
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.3
- Hardened SEF against XSS injection
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.3
Low Level Threats
- Potential SQL injection in Polls modules through the Itemid variable
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.x series
- Potential SQL injection in several methods in mosDBTable class
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.x series
- Potential misuse of Media component file management functions
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.x series
- Add search limit param (default of 50) to `Search` Mambots to prevent search flooding
- Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.x series
Since this is a security release, it is advised that you upgrade as soon as possible.
Posted in Joomla.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 22, 2005
Opera has announced a beta software development kit (SDK) for its mobile phone Web browser and user interface package, called Opera Platform.
I thought I was the only one seeing the benefit of using Ajax. 
Full Article at News.com
Posted in Ajax.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 21, 2005
Dave over at ILoveJackDaniels.com has a nice cheat sheet in PDF and PNG format. Nice and wallet sized. Included, you’ll find a guide to the XMLHttpRequest object, functions and methods (from DOM and otherwise), some simple JavaScript, Regular Expressions and Events.
This has come in very handy to me personally, so I urge any serious web developer (except the experts, of course) to take a look at this and keep it close. Trust me, it is a real time saver.
Posted in Ajax.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 21, 2005
Brian Goldfarb, a Microsoft Product Manager, had an interview some days ago where he answered questions about the company’s plans with Ajax development tools. This is quite an interesting article. However, I love the way that Dion at Ajaxian.com summarized things summarizes things:
To some up:
- “Ajax is hard”
- “Microsoft invented Ajax”
- “Microsoft will make it easier”
This was basically what Brian Goldfarb seemed to have been getting to.
Posted in Ajax.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 21, 2005
This is where many web developers tend to disagree. We can never seem to settle on a good code editor, ever. I’m going to leave you with a few of my favorites and some that I hate.
First off, I live and die by Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac. As a matter of fact, I also use Macromedia Fireworks 8heavily for my web site designs. I just think that they have done a good job and incorporating HTML and CSS together. Especially with version 8.0. But then again, you get what you pay for because it’s going to set you back quite a pretty penny ($399). But it was a good investment for me.
On the other hand we have the Frontpage junkies. I haven’t really looked at Frontpage much since early 2000. I’ve opened up the version that comes with Office XP, but I was not impressed. What I do remember is that back in the day it was horrible. Frontpage used to dump a bunch of Microsoft specific “tags” into the code that it just served to bulk up the final output. There is the small advance of using Frontpage Extensions, which enable things like site counters and other things (sorry, I really haven’t been looking into it), but the problem lies in the fact that Frontpage extensions on servers usually cost more and they are very limited, and simply I haven’t heard anything about Frontpage lately, so I’m staying away from it.
For PHP editing I use a simply text editor called emEditor. One nice feature is tabbed editing. It also has syntax highlighting. Since I don’t write or compose very large PHP scripts, this is more than adequate for me.
When I’m at work and on Linux (Fedora) I stick to KDevelop. Most likely, I would be doing some C programming anyways, so it is just convenient since it is already opened to just drag and drop scripts and HTML files in there. I don’t, however, do any heavy HTML design on Linux though. I haven’t found tools suitable for such yet. There is something called NVU, but it just doesn’t do enough for me to design a site from scratch using this.
Posted in General, Work.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 19, 2005
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