Total Recall for AJAX applications – Firefox extension

Ajax, or AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications[9]. Web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of an existing web page. [9] One of the biggest problems with Ajax applications is saving state and accommodating the succession of the history controls, (Back/forward buttons). Ajax allows documents to become stateful, but when the user intuitively goes for the history controls in the browser window, things go wrong. The user expects to see the previous state of the document and is surprised to see a webpage they were on 20 minutes ago, before they arrived at the Ajax application. Our project aims to solve this problem. We have implemented an extension to the Firefox Mozilla browser that caches different states of web pages at regular intervals and displays all the different states of the page as the user navigates through the history

THE NEW “UNIVERSAL TRUTH” OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB

We all see that the world wide web is permanently evolving and developing. New websites are created continuously and push the limits of the old HTML specs in all respects. HTML4 is the real standard for almost 10 years and developers are starting to look for new and improved technologies to help them provide greater functionality. In order to give the authors flexibility and interoperability and to enable much more interactive and innovative websites and applications, HTML5 introduces and enhances a large set of features, such as new form elements, APIs, multimedia elements, structure and semantics updates. The development of HTML5, started in 2004, is currently carried out by a joint effort of the W3C HTMLWG and the WHATWG organizations. A lot of important companies participate in this effort, including the largest browser developers: Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Apple. The specifications of the new “to be” standard is still work in progress and quite a way lies ahead before its completion. Taking into account this fact there is a certain possibility that the features presented below have already been somehow modified or changed even in the near future.html5, cross-platform, css3, JavaScript, mobile application development, flexibility, interoperability

Mobile application platform heterogeneity: Android vs Windows phone vs iOS vs Firefox OS

Modern smartphones have a rich spectrum of increasingly sophisticated features, opening opportunities for software-led innovation. Of the large number of platforms to develop new software on, in this paper we look closely at three platforms identified as market leaders for the smartphone market by Gartner Group in 2013 and one platform, Firefox OS, representing a new paradigm for operating systems based on web technologies. We compare the platforms in several different categories, such as software architecture, application development, platform capabilities and constraints, and, finally, developer support. Using the implementation of a mobile version of the tic-tac-toe game on all the four platforms, we seek to investigate strengths, weaknesses and challenges of mobile application development on these platforms. Big differences are highlighted when inspecting community environments, hardware abilities and platform maturity. These inevitably impact upon developer choices when deciding on mobile platform development strategies

Awarding Innovation: An Assessment of the Digital Media and Learning Competition

Increasing availability and accessibility of digital media have changed the ways in which young people learn, socialize, play, and engage in civic life. Seeking to understand how learning environments and institutions should transform to respond to these changes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the Foundation) launched the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Initiative in 2005. This report highlights the successes and challenges of one component of the DML Initiative: the DML Competition (the Competition)

Towards using online portfolios in computing courses

The direct experience we had with teaching a summer pre-college computing course in which we adopted an online portfolio approach has led us to consider the use of online portfolios in our regular computer science undergraduate courses. The technical challenges we foresee include: the necessary support from the college\u27s IT department; the use of Microsoft-based web authoring technologies vs. the use of Open Source / freeware counterparts; the need for adequate technical knowledge on the part of our faculty; the need for server-side hardware and software resources