I've created a little Javascript demo with MochiKit allow one to select between 0 and 5 stars.

Here's a slideshow (mainly) on what's coming up in Javascript 1.7 and 2. Alas, of not too much use if the Internet Explorer don't sign on.

Update: there's Python-like Iterators, which is pretty cool.

I'm just blown away by the stuff Jack Slocum is doing with the Yahoo UI javascript library.

Via Ajaxian, Dojo 0.4 (cross browser AJAX/Javascript libraries) has been released. I'll steal some of Ajaxian's point form list of updates:

• dojo.charting: A charting engine to implement a variety of chart types using vector graphics
• dojo.gfx: a 2D vector graphics API which renders natively to browsers as SVG or VML
• dojo.i18n: a follow on to the translation support in 0.3.1, there is now build support for collecting localized resources in a single file as well as support for localized date and time formatting. More formatting types and more localization to come in 0.5.
• dojo.widget: new widgets like Clock, FilteringTable, ProgressBar, plus enhancements to Editor2 and the AccordionContainer. Also localization of some widgets, such as DatePicker.

The charting and 2D stuff look really neat and useful.

We slipped a photo album extension into the product on Friday; you can see one right here. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work on Internet Explorer -- the image sometimes displays as blank.

The explaination is here:

The issue is that changing the 'src' attribute of an <image> tag, is making the image disappear, rather than change. Frustratingly, the problem only happens in IE; Gecko behaves as expected.

I have found two work arounds: one is to pop up an alert just after chainging 'src': the icon image correctly updates when the alert dialog is popped up (before dismissing it). The second is to use a callback with the 'setTimeout' method. The first is unacceptable, the second is, IMHO, simply ugly.

We went with the setTimeout method, obviously:

onclick : function(index, again) {
    if (document.all && !again) {
        window.setTimeout("i$(ID).onclick(" + index + ", 1)", 1)
    }

I've got page loading time on this site -- for constructed pages¹ -- down to near 1 second times. Most of this one second is coming from network and rendering delays, which I'll have to sort out later -- locally I can curl the page in 0.065 seconds!). As previously documented, I've already done the following:

• used mod_deflate to compress the data sent over the network (for example, on our main page right now this reduces the data sent from 128K to 20.6K)
• loaded static images and scripts from an offsite server

After a lot of mulling today, I've made another big improvement. Formerly, we used to load information about the user's session from a URI called '/:admin/status/'. This returned three pieces of critical information: the IHOST, the USERID, and the HOME. The IHOST is the installation host (semantic.blogmatrix.com), the USERID is the user you are logged in as (or the empty string), and HOME is set only if you serve your pages from a different URI than the default².

This caused rendering to pause for .75 to 1.5 seconds depending on how well the network was responding. Effectively, the made the site feel really sluggish.

We now do the following: IHOST is just built into the templates; USERID and HOME are loaded into Cookies when the user is logged in. When these values are needed, instead of taking them out of Javascript variables, we call functions that pull them out of Cookies.

Instant speed. 

¹. We don't work under the same model as TypePad or Blogger. We only put a page together when we don't have it in cache. This could take several more seconds. Once a page is constructed, we'll always serve it from cache until the cache is invalidated (say, by a new post or comment being added).

2. For example, I serve my personal blog as http://blog.davidjanes.com even though deep down it's really http://davidjanes.semantic.blogmatrix.com!