Tales from the Evil Empire

Miljan from ComponentArt announces the 2008 release of their charting engine. It's a really interesting engine for Ajax developers because it has a full client-side object model. Check it out.

ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1 contains a new feature that enables the application developer to combine scripts in order to reduce the number of downloaded files. But in order to do that, the developer must have a way of discovering what scripts are being used in a page or application.

I recorded a 5 minute screencast that shows how to use the new script combining feature in ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1:
http://asp.net/learn/3.5-SP1/video-296.aspx

I'll switch to French for this post as the talk will be in French.

Mike Harder found this one that I didn't know about: all exceptions that you may get from the browser are not Error instances. DOMException is an exception that gets thrown when a DOM operation fails, but for some incomprehensible reason it doesn't derive from Error like SyntaxError or TypeError:

There's been some debate recently about good ways that we could enable web sites to share the browser cache in the future. The problem is that popular JavaScript frameworks currently end up being downloaded several times from different sites that use them and this is a great waste of resources. Of course, there are some ways to achieve re-use of scripts across sites today by hosting those frameworks in a central location, but that is an expensive thing to do for framework developers, most of which are open source projects (it basically amounts to asking the framework developers to pay for the hosting cost of everyone that uses them).

The OpenAjax Alliance has been working with some of the top Ajax developers on a wishlist that aims at gathering and prioritizing the development features that we need the most from next generation browsers. The process is completely open and Wiki-based, so feel free to contribute.