Best Web 2.0 Sites in India

I am compiling a list of best Web 2.0 sites in India. I am most likely going to do a writeup on each of the sites, and then suggest making a group of like minded people, who can exchange great ideas. The initial list is following in no particular order. Feel free to add more in this list, by commenting this post:

1. http://www.ApnaBill.com
2. http://bumsonthesaddle.com/
3. http://quillpad.com/
4. http://videoontherocks.indya.com/ (gave me a bunch of "[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Can't connect to MySQL server on '192.168.1.5' (10061)" errors)
5. http://www.cleartrip.com/
6. http://bigflix.com/
7. http://www.cleartrip.com/
8. http://www.magicbricks.com/
9. http://www.yulop.com/
10. http://bookeazy.com/
11. http://iBibo.com/
12. http://Burrp.com/

Simple Tooltip

http://codeeazy.com/mktooltip/

I wanted a tooltip implementation for my web page, and was looking around. I looked a number of open-source options (see 40 tooltip scripts here and 20 here) and one commercial library. I liked the functionality however each of them was 7, 8, 10 or 25 KB in size, which I thought was too much to implement just a simple tooltip. So, I thought how about I write a tooltip library myself.

Here is an implementation, check it out at http://codeeazy.com/mktooltip/. I implemented this in 818 bytes of code, and about an hour of coding. So one would think, there must be something wrong. Well, it works. And is cool!

xtimeline is neat

xtimeline is neat. It lets you draw timeliness for anything. See following example. The best thing I like about it is it's flawless rendering of the time-lines by purely using XHTML and CSS. I love the mouseover and the right columnThe mouseWay to go guys!

Google Gears and client side caching

This is getting more and more interesting. Today I read an article that explained Google Gears very lucidly.

I think, this is going to make UI coding and the design patterns still more interesting. Large parts of relatively static data can be cached on client side, data that the browser cannot cache easily, like DHTML tables. I am wondering if I can use it in my Flex 2 application.

I guess the only downside is that the user will be asked to install Google Gears on their desktop. I don't see much of a problem, since I used it for Google Reader. However, if this was used with some more critical application, I will probably think twice before I do that.

Here is an interesting code snippet, originally here:

function initializedb() { if (!window.google || !google.gears) return; try { db = google.gears.factory.create('beta.database', '1.0'); } catch (ex) { alert('Could not create database: ' + ex.message); } if (db) { db.open('gearsintro'); db.execute('create table if not exists articles' + ' ( article_id int, title varchar(255), content text )'); } showArticles(); }

Sun's introduction of JavaFX

Slashdot reports, posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 08, @05:24PM:

"Internetnews is reporting on Sun's introduction of JavaFX at JavaOne today. Looks like a combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX with a friendly programming interface. Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs. Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends. JavaFX has the potential to satisfy this opportunity even better than did Java over a decade ago. Along with AJAX, let's hope JavaFX also puts paid to Microsoft's viral Active-X and JScript, and, more importantly, that it really is a web scripting language that developers can grok."

Well, I don't think so. SUN has a lot of catch up to do. There are thousands of programmers who are coding new AJAX frameworks or enhancing existing AJAX frameworks as we talk.

This only means we will have more fragmentation in this space. If SUN comes up with a really good SDK for JavaFX, that will be cool.

DOJO Footprint and Ajax Performance

Ajaxian reports something that I have faced in the past:

Coach Wei of Nexaweb has been spending time on the Dojo Footprint and Ajax Performance Recommendations. He ran a Dojo Performance Overhead Challenge which involved creating a simple widget with Dojo, and one from scratch:

After building and packaging the my simple Dojo widget, the custom build produces a new dojo.js that has packed all necessary files, but only the necessary file, into one single download. The footprint of this custom dojo.js is 168KB.

In contrast, if I wrote this simple widget from scratch without using Dojo, its footprint would be under 10KB(with compression, it would be under 2KB).

Given the dramatic difference in footprint, my conclusion is that Dojo is not suitable for this use scenario.

Dylan Schiemann responded discussing how the Dojo team is pushing hard to solve some of these problems.