I’m always told to start a speech with a good story, so I assume you’re supposed to start a blog entry with a bad story.

Initially what attracted me to jQuery was it’s compactness. It doesn’t have separately defined classes for each component, like Prototype. There’s one point of entry and most everything revolves around DOM elements. There’s no distinction between selecting a single or multiple DOM element(s) and, because jQuery only uses a selector syntax, you don’t get confused whether the parameter passed is an ID, class, etc.

A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to add a delay between jQuery functions. This small but very useful plugin that has saved me a lot of time. I haven't done a lot of testing, but because the plugin is so small and simple (only 212 bytes!) I don't think I could have missed much!

This post give you a insight view of various PHP frameworks.....when should you use it ...which is suitable for you etc.

All Hibernate Search mapping metadata is described through annotations. Hibernate Search metadata is very code centric and shares a lot of information from the class structure: annotations are a natural fit and avoid lots of redundancy compared to other metadata models like XML. It would be quite simple to add an XML deployment descriptor support for Hibernate Search. Nobody has found the time and interest to write this layer (so far) which seems to prove that this feature is not that strongly desired by the Hibernate Search community.

The intent of this how-to series is to demonstrate the development of a rich Web service API on a variety of popular development frameworks. Part 2 (this tutorial) targets JBoss Seam.

The cause for this post is a post by Rob Conery where he suggests removing the RDMBS from the equation, at least during development. In particular, he suggests using an OODB during development and switching to RDBMS late in the game, when going to production. The reason for doing so in order to reduce the friction of having to maintain a database during development.

Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up. Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week.

Only a few days after SpringSource acquisition of G2One, Graeme Rocher announced the release of Grails 1.0.4 this past Friday (latest Spring 2.5.6, some new features, all that ahead of the 1.1 version).

Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces.

New release with a new Ajax Starter-Kit. This time it's an Ajax Calendar Starter-Kit which is a minimalistic implementation of GCalendar

Today, we released Zend Framework 1.7.0. This release features AMF support, JQuery support, and Twitter support, among numerous other offerings. For this particular release, we tried very hard to leverage the community. The majority of new features present in 1.7.0 are from community proposals, or were primarily driven by community contributors. For me, this represents a milestone: ZF is now at a stage where fewer and fewer core components are necessary, and the community is able to build off it and add extra value to the project.

ItsNat approach "The Browser Is The Server" (TBITS) simulates a Universal W3C Java Browser in the server, client events are sent to the server via AJAX and converted to W3C Java DOM Events, changes in DOM server are automatically sent to the client as JavaScript updating the client DOM.

One of the relatively obscure features of ASP.NET view rendering is that you can render a single view using multiple view engines.

I am pleased to announce the first release of SmartGWT - GWT API's for SmartClient . This release is extremely feature rich and has been thoroughly tested, with around 250 samples in the Showcase illustrating various features and patterns. A huge thanks to the early adopters who have been using / testing / contributing samples over the past four weeks.

Stripes-Quickstart is an Ant script that speeds up the process of creating a new Stripes project.

A completely different approach: PrettyFaces preserves parameter values between requests, and is faster than other Pretty URL tools; it uses only one request/response to re-render a pretty URL, where other OpenSource solutions require two. Page-load actions, integration with faces navigation, dynamic view-id assignment, and managed parameter parsing are all features of PrettyFaces.

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week:

I've talked to lots of PHP and Java programmers who love the idea and concept of Rails, but are afraid of stepping in because of Ruby. The argument goes that since they already know PHP or Java, that it would be less work to just pick one of the Rails knockoffs in those languages. I really don't think so.

Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play! focuses on developers productivity and targets RESTfull Architectures. Read the overview.

Quartz plugin allows your Grails application to schedule jobs to be executed using a specified interval or cron expression. The underlying system uses the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler configured via Spring, but is made simpler by the coding by convention paradigm.

Malo is ultra small css library for building web sites.

Pivot is a platform for building rich internet applications that run in the Java Plugin. While Pivot applications are often built using a combination of XML and Java, it is sometimes more convenient to build simple applications or applications whose code is likely to change often, such as prototypes, using a scripting language such as JavaScript. Pivot now allows developers to write their application logic using their scripting language of choice, using the features provided by the javax.script package available in Java 6 and above.

(Almost) every time you use retain in Objective-C/Cocoa, you really should be using copy. Using retain can introduce some subtle bugs, and copy is faster then you think…

The easiest way to access to Twitter from a Java program is with a Java API like Twitter4J, java-twitter or jtwitter. As Twitter4J is in the Maven repositories, we will use it to make a simple Maven application. For people wo do not know Maven, this can be a first introduction.