Hello Ajaxians!

We’re inviting all of the Java developers out there to an event organized by our sister site, TheServerSide.com, the Web’s largest enterprise Java community. As a member of Ajaxian, you save an extra $100 off the registration fee with the code AJAXIAN. (Register before January 16 to save a total of $400 and get a free book!)

TheServerSide Java Symposium explores current and emerging trends in enterprise Java and how they apply to your daily work. Choose from over 45 technical sessions on new technologies, best practices and practical tips from some of the brightest minds in the industry, including Rod Johnson, Neal Ford, Scott Davis and 35 Java experts.

Tracks include Frameworks, Architecture, SOA, Language, Tools and Techniques.

Project and spec leads dive into:

• The latest features of Spring, JSF, Wicket, Tapestry, Google Web Toolkit and more frameworks.
• New Java language features, such as EJB 3.1, Glassfish and JavaFX
• Popular open source tools, including Eclipse, Maven, Lucene, soapUI, HtmlUnit for testing SOA, Ajax and RIAs.
• Expert recommendations on the use of Groovy, Scala and JRuby
• Building and maintaining a large-scale SOA
• How to create and consume RESTful Web Services.
• How and when to use an ESB.
• Best practices and tools for optimizing performance and scalability.
• And much more!

View TheServerSide Java Symposium agenda to see all of the sessions being presented. Register now with the code AJAXIAN to save an extra $100 and to get a free book while supplies last.

Over in SproutCore land, they have been talking about Peter Bergstrom and his amazing work with Canvas and SVG:

Peter Bergstrom has been doing some amazing work with SVG and canvas tags in his SproutCore-based these project called PaperCube.  PaperCube visualizes citations their relationships between authors.  Watching the videos of his project, you’d swear he was using Flash or Silverlight, but its not.  He’s using only native web technologies powered by SproutCore and JavaScript.  It’s a great example of what’s possible using the browser’s capabilities today.

Checkout PaperCube’s Node Graph (SVG),  Per Year View (SVG), and Paper Tree (pure HTML).

Starting to get goose pimples about 2009 :)

Jacob Seidelin has a really nice 2008 roundup of awesome JavaScript-yness that focuses a little on his own area of expertise (canvas whiz and all):

2008 has been just great, not least because of all the great stuff people have been doing with JavaScript, the new canvas element and the web in general. Browser vendors are now competing, trying to outdo each other in terms of JavaScript performance, leaving developers and end-users as winners as we now get to do cool stuff that wasn’t really feasible before. Here’s a summary of the neat things of the year 2008 as I saw it.

He starts out with fun canvas games such as Super Mario, Pac-Man, Breakout, Space Invaders, Bomberman or T&C Surf Designs.

Then we get to some fun demos… including small ones Rubber effect, Tunnex, Mars.

Then we get to 3D: Everything from basic 3D cubes, texturing experiments to regular JavaScript/Canvas 3D engines have been done.

And, emulators:

That JavaScript performance is getting better and better must be true since it’s now possible to emulate other systems in the browser. Matt Westcott (who also made the Antisocial demo) pulled another rabbit out of the hat, JSSpeccy the ZX Spectrum emulator. That’s just way cool.

James Urquhart also played a bit and created a proof of concept SCUMM interpreter. It won’t let you play Day of the Tentacle or even Maniac Mansion, but supposedly it can at least let you see a bit of OpenQuest.

A personal favorite of mine was António Afonso’s JavaScript AGI interpreter. AGI was the system used by Sierra in the golden days of adventure gaming and when António made this little gem with an (almost) working Leisure Suit Larry, it just totally tickled my fancy.

This is just the start, as we get to audio, visual, and other cool fun times from 2008. Thanks for the great roundup Jacob. I think 2009 will be even better!

Alvaro Videla has a fun post on extending the WebKit Web Inspector with something a little strange.... a game:

Alvaro walks through how to take some JavaScript/CSS/HTML and plug it into the inspector world (normally hidden somewhere like /Applications/WebKit.app/Contents/Frameworks/10.5/WebCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/inspector) and adding panels (e.g. see the new game panel here:)

Robert Tomsick has been playing with Sandboxed Safari, a project that aims to let you use the Leopard sandbox feature with the browser, via a little launcher:

When Leopard was released, one of its big selling points was its "sandbox" feature. This garnered a fair bit of attention, as sandboxing is a fairly new feature for consumer operating systems.

A lot of people (myself included) assumed that Leopard's sandbox system would be used for Safari, seeing as how web browser exploits are a tremendously popular attack vector. Unfortunately, Leopard's version of Safari is not sandboxed. In fact, very little of the OS actually is. I don't know the real reason behind this, but I suspect it had to do with the release date pressures. Although Leopard ships with a number of sandbox profiles for things like syslog and ntpd, they are not used in the default config. Pretty much the only things that are sandboxed are mDNSResponder and some xgrid daemons. A quick look at the comments in the existing policies indicate that Leopard's sandbox system (named "seatbelt") is rather... buggy. As it turns out, the comments don't lie -- seatbelt *is* quite buggy, at least as of 10.5.6. Still, it's an extraordinarily powerful (not to mention cool) feature, and it's got a lot of potential to increase the security of Mac OS X.

But enough rambling about seatbelt. I'll make a few pages documenting what I've learned about it -- but until I get around to doing that, let's talk about Safari. Basically, I found that Leopard's sandbox system, buggy though it may be, is sufficiently mature as to allow the development of a seatbelt policy for Safari, albeit with some caveats. SandboxedSafari is my attempt at developing such a policy.

He continues to discuss the flaws: No plugin support, overly-permissive process-exec rules, no network filtering, no address book integration, no keychain, focus issues.

It will be interesting to see if Safari 4 + Snow Leopard gets us this out of the box.