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.

One of our best-selling CSS books of all time, The Art & Science of CSS (valued at $29.95), is FREE to download for two weeks. All you need to do to grab a free copy of this awesome CSS book is follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter. We’re calling it a Twitaway—a Twitter giveaway!

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.

There is really a bigger issue at the heart of this: who is your Javadoc intended for? In this blog entry, I intend to discuss some of the things I have found that have made the Javadoc I generate or consume (others' documentation) to be more effective. The audience for the Javadoc is often the most significant consideration when considering what should go in the Javadoc comments.

JExplorer (derivative from Java Explorer) provides a convenient Java API for integrating Microsoft Internet Explorer into Java applications. With JExplorer, you can use the IE browser as a Java Swing UI component, in headless mode, or programmatically manipulate it without embedding in the UI. You can do all these and many other integration tasks purely in the Java language. No specific knowledge of COM or the Microsoft Internet Explorer API is required.

In software, everyone agrees that testing is good, but there is a lot of disagreement on the level of testing that is necessary. Fortunately, there is not an industry standard or government software code that mandates certain testing because this industry is still figuring it out. The hypothesis of this article is that if you can't afford to test it, you can't afford to sell it

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!

Here's part 5, covering the Nodes API and the Explorer & Property Sheet API via 3 small demos and a bit of explanation.

In their book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman present the twelve best questions you can ask your team members to determine how they feel about their jobs. These questions are the result of one of the largest research efforts ever performed on the topic of people management.

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

The Pyjamas Book Online is being developed as a comprehensive guide and reference to developing Pyjamas Applications in Python. Pyjamas allows the developer to escape from AJAX and Javascript and program exclusively in Python, if desired, for the creation of Rich Internet and Desktop applications, using the same Python source code for both Desktop and Web. Pyjamas is a port of GWT to Python.

There have been some sad developments within the Engine Yard Rubinius team that I’d like to address head on. Earlier today, I had the unfortunate task of reducing the team size to 2 people, which meant laying off the rest of the team.

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.

Have you waded knee-deep into web standards and thought you’d never again encounter a table element? Tables may have quickly been shrunk from as “bad” and “evil,” due to past abuses as a layout element, but the web standards movement hasn’t quite eliminated them from the planet. In fact, all the proliferation of semantic markup has done is send tables back to doing what they do best: presenting tabular data.

After a few maintenance updates, Google is readying a more significant Chrome update that fixes a known security issue and delivers an improved V8 JavaScript interpreter. The updated version also addresses some of the missing end-user features, such as more privacy options, a separate bookmark manager and a re-worked pop-up blocker that no longer blocks annoying pop-up windows by loading them in a minimized window state.

If you want to start reading about Scrum take a look at this article. Quite comprehensive set of links and book list about Scrum you should consider reading.

Hey check this out

We moved this site to Webby in hopes that we’d blog more if we didn’t have to leave TextMate to do it. Along the way, we fell in love with this little gem.

DZone, together with Manning, will be giving away a copy of the book Open Source ESBs in Action. If you want to stand a chance to get the free book, then you have to leave a comment at the end of this reveiw for the authors of the book. So, keep those comments coming in and stand a chance to get a copy of this excellent book.

When Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. Instead of starting up another machine, asking a colleague with a Mac, or simply ignoring those crazy followers of Steve Jobs, Weaver just pops over to the browser in another window. That's easy because Visual Studio is running on Windows inside a Parallels virtual machine, which, in turn, runs on his Mac. He has a PC, a Mac, and a Unix development box all in one.

Very informative article on how to set up hibernate 2nd level cache.

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).