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Closed 11 years ago.
I am interested in learning to develop browser extensions for most major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE), but I am unsure of where to start. To keep my interest up, I would like to start developing for the browser which has the gentlest learning curve.
So, what is your experience developing extensions for different browsers? Naturally, one must have developed for more than one browser in order to give a reasonable answer.
I am an experienced web developer, and also have no problems with C++/Java/Ruby/Erlang, etc, so the question is not what I am capable of learning, but rather what I most quickly would reap the fruits of.
In my experience Chrome is the easiest to write extensions for. It uses only standard web technologies like HTML and JavaScript, with a compact extension API that will seem familiar to anyone with web development skills. This contrasts with Firefox which requires knowledge of a number of other more or less proprietary languages, file formats and APIs like XUL, RDF and XPCOM. This means that the learning curve to get into Firefox extension development is steeper.
On the other hand, Chrome offer limited capabilities for extensions such adding buttons to the toolbar and using script to modify the contents of a web page. Extensions are heavily sandboxed and have restricted access to resources on the local machine. If your extension requires additional capabilities then you will have to use an NPAPI or PPAPI plugin, which is much more complex. In this case, it would be easier to use Firefox which offers much broader capabilities to extensions "out of the box".
I just wanted to add some insights regarding this that I found: http://alfonsoml.blogspot.com/2011/02/creating-extensions-for-each-browser.html
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Closed 9 years ago.
Dart supports interfacing with the native libraries (Ref: http://www.dartlang.org/articles/native-extensions-for-standalone-dart-vm/). There are some decent libraries available for socket communication, interfacing with databases and dealing with filesystems. Barring desktop GUI applications, I don't see any reason why it cannot be used as a general purpose language. What are advantages/disadvantages of Dart being used as a general purpose language (including performance)?
Yes. Dart can be used as a general purpose programming language.
Advantages:
It's fast, already faster than V8, and catching up to the JVM (Though
it starts up much quicker).
It's great for scripting on macos/linux. You can prefix a source file with #!/usr/bin/env dart
Backed by a large team/company who are developing it in the open, along with an active community.
Good documentation and articles.
Disadvantages:
It's new. There are far more libraries available for Java, Python and node.js than for Dart.
There are likely to be changes to the core IO libraries before it hits 1.0.
No built-in support on cloud-hosting platforms, though there is a heroku buildpack.
Note you can build GUI applications using dart2js and chrome packaged apps.
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Closed 10 years ago.
You guys know any open source Blackberry applications. IMO looking at source code of good projects helps learn the system better, faster and not to mention reduces development time. Is there a recommended list of such projects or if not, can we build such a list? I think it will really be useful to other developers.
My apologize for delay in answer. Here are links for useful Java BB apps, libraries and code:
Wordpress for BB
LogicMail - alternate mail client
Facebook SDK for BB - FB SDK not from RIM nor FB
Wireless music sync app
BB Tracker - quite old one
BB tools - also quite old one
I'm not saying that code from there is standard (For me the LogicMail is most acceptable) but there are plenty of useful code about networking, storage, gps and ui. As well please take in attention advanced UI samples from RIM mentioned by #Nate
I only have time to post one link here, but this is one I would definitely recommend for all beginners, because it helps understand UI development, which (in my opinion) is definitely more difficult to learn on BlackBerry versus other mobile platforms (especially Android or iOS).
See information about it on BlackBerry's site here
or the github repository here
If you're using the legacy BlackBerry Java APIs (OS <= 7), you will certainly wind up subclassing the built-in RIM UI classes, to add functionality of your own. There's a good chance that many of the things you want to do are already done, or at least started, in this Advanced UI project.
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Closed 10 years ago.
So, since one cannot build metro style apps with F# and it isn’t possible to reference a F# library from within a metro style app, where is the place of F# in Windows 8?
I mean what is its future?
Won’t F# have the same fate as Silverlight after a while? Does Microsoft have the will to develop it farther?
I know, I know I can still develop asp.net, WCF and desktop applications in F#, but the question is what are the long term plans of the Microsoft with it?
Will it perish some day, or will live forever?
Edited:
Well, I’m fine with impossibility to build metro style apps in F#. I assume that its Lightweight\Verbose syntax and the need for indentation make it difficult to write a XAML pre-processor or write a VS template. The question is, is it an experimental project aimed to take the best parts of it and include them into C#, or F# has a future in Windows eco-system?
I think your assumptions are wrong - it should be possible to reference F# library from a C# Metro-style application if you create Portable Library project in Visual Studio 11.
So, F# will definitely continue to be useful as a langauge for developing the "difficult" part of Windows application where you implement your domain model, algorithms, network communication etc.
Moreover, with projects like Pit (or commercial WebSharper), it is possible to write F# applications that will be truly portable and can run not just on Windows 8, but also on Android tablets or on the iPad as JavaScript applications.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am creating some new layouts which would work on both desktop (IE,FF,Safari) and mobile browsers (mainly tablets like iPad)
Now the UI designs have a lot of touch-based things, curved borders/gradients, audio/video, etc and would be completely fluid (no fixed px)
To summarize, it seems like using HTML5, CSS3 would be a better approach even from a future perspective. However, IE8 (one of the major browsers) has limited support for HTML5/CSS3 and no media query support. While some of these things have workarounds, I am not really sure whether supporting IE8 would be a good idea.
I wanted to know if there are any major websites which have officially stopped supporting IE8 and if yes, which are they ?
Whoa, hold your horses, there's still discussions going on about whether IE6 should be supported. IE8 is a definite yes. Don't remove support for it!
As web developers we LOVE to bash on IE versions - it's so fun, with their weird interpretations of browser standards, but you have to realise that removing support is like chopping a portion of your user base out of the mix. Why would you want less visitors?
IE9 hasn't long been out on release so don't drop support for legacy versions unless you have a very good reason.
I know we love CSS3 and HTML5 but for most things there are Javascript workarounds to keep the browser degradation to a minimum.
I would suggest that NO major websites have removed support for IE8.
Every browser has limited support for HTML5/CSS3. Here's one table of compatibilities.
The real question is, what is your audience? In my case, I designed an intranet site and decided to drop all support for IE. If IE worked, swell! If it didn't, then it cost less for the user to install Firefox or Chrome just for my app than for me to write my site twice, which is pretty much what IE 6 support will push you into.
I thought IE 8 was one of the good ones, though? Certainly it was supposed to be more secure and easier to support than IE 6.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am having a hard time understanding what the major purpose of Google's programming language Dart is. What's its role? Why would I want to use it?
You may checkout the technical aspects on this article. Quote:
The Dart programming language is presented here in its early stages.
The following design goals will guide the continued evolution and
refinement of this open source project:
Create a structured yet flexible programming language for the web.
Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to
learn.
Ensure that all Dart language constructs allow high performance
and fast application startup.
Make Dart appropriate for the full range
of devices on the web—including phones, tablets, laptops, and servers.
Provide tools that make Dart run fast across all major modern
browsers.
These design goals address the following problems currently
facing web developers:
Small scripts often evolve into large web applications with no
apparent structure—they’re hard to debug and difficult to maintain. In
addition, these monolithic apps can’t be split up so that different
teams can work on them independently. It’s difficult to be productive
when a web application gets large.
Scripting languages are popular
because their lightweight nature makes it easy to write code quickly.
Generally, the contracts with other parts of an application are
conveyed in comments rather than in the language structure itself. As
a result, it’s difficult for someone other than the author to read and
maintain a particular piece of code.
With existing languages, the
developer is forced to make a choice between static and dynamic
languages. Traditional static languages require heavyweight toolchains
and a coding style that can feel inflexible and overly constrained.
Developers have not been able to create homogeneous systems that
encompass both client and server, except for a few cases such as
Node.js and Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Different languages and formats
entail context switches that are cumbersome and add complexity to the
coding process.
Major purpose of dart language is replacement of JavaScript. It fixes common issues of JavaScript, it is actually compiled to JavaScript, but in the future it will have its own VM.
Main advantages over JavaScript are that it is object oriented interface inheritance based language, it has support for interface factory builders. It has simpliefed actor model called isolators.