Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more structured approach to Web programming.Making Dart work will require a new virtual machine, which puts ...

When manipulating the DOM, it's often useful to remove all child nodes from a specific element. This typically comes in handy when you're looking to replace the content of an element with a separate form element, such as an <input>, so the user can edit the actual value.Here's an example of something I recently created that illustrates my point:Get the Flash Player to see this player.These "dynamic form elements" are written to the page only when the user performs a certain action; in this case: clicking on a table cell.The HTML for the table cell ...

[Apple and Google have locked application discovery and distribution within their app stores. VisionMobile's Andreas Constantinou explains how Facebook is using the web to disintermediate Apple/Google and why the web needs a new leader].The platform duopoly.In just the space of 3 years, the mobile platforms landscape has changed from an election race to an oligarchy. The network effects at the heart of the Apple and Google business models have created formidable barriers to entry. The growth in device shipments and apps created seems to continue a relentless climb, showing no signs of develope...

I see a lot of people on forums and on my training courses asking about the best way (or any way) to manage dates stored in a MySQL database and used in PHP. Three options follow, but first the problem.PHP uses unix timestamps for all its date functionality. It has methods to convert these timestamps into pretty much any text format you could want but internally it uses the timestamp format. A timestamp is simply an integer. Specifically, it’s the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight on January 1st 1970 (greenwich mean time).MySQL has three date types f...

Getting started with web development isn’t easy. Looking back to when I started, the first few weeks were the toughest to stick with it. For someone who is new to text editors and the terminal – the installation process can be really overwhelming. I recently went through the process of helping some of my friends get set up with Ruby on Rails and after doing it a few times, I realized it would be helpful to write a post that others looking to get started could refer to.The following is not going to fully explain the steps (which at some point will be important to understand). Inst...

As developers and designers we work hard to build visually attractive, fast and easy to maintain applications. Our goals are to make sure the applications we build stick to users and keep them coming back for more. Security is not always at the forefront of our minds. No one intentionally builds insecure software but often a lack of security knowledge leads developers to build vulnerabilities into their applications. In this article we are going to examine two web security attacks, how they are executed and how to defend against them. By the end of this article you will have a few techniques i...

Once upon a time, audio on the web lived primarily in the world of third-party browser plug-ins like Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight. This was not a bad world, but it had its issues.For one, most plug-ins require the user to install them, but not all users are willing (or able) to install them. Also, many players built with these plug-ins are inaccessible, making it difficult for folks who use assistive technologies to access the audio or alternative content.Then there are the front-end design hassles like trying to get a dropdown menu to display on top of a plug-in-based player. And letâ€...

IntroductionHTML5 has been a really hot topic in web development. With the support of most modern browsers available (Safari, chrome, firefox, IE10 and mobile devices), even though the specification has not fully completed yet, but many people have already adopted it as the main technology for all the web development projects. Online giant websites such as Google, facebook, twitter and youtube, they are all built in HTML5!For me, the most exciting features of HTML5 are the canvas and the robust form capabilities. Canvas experiment can be seen all over the places (not IE, better with Chrome) bu...