First release of code

[Peter Michaux]

Hi,

Five days, 11 libraries and 30-something browsers later and the testing
is over. I learned some very interesting things about browsers over the
last few days. XMLHttpRequest support has travelled along a very bumpy
road that isn't quite smoothed out even now. Rails Ajax tricks are
still a great idea but were too optimistic about how browsers handled
HTTP when Rails RJS was released. Opacity is still not a definite go
and computed style reporting is not reliable. Browsers on Windows XP
use less memory than browsers on OS X.

Here are the testing results. I'm happy with the degradation paths.
Reasonably new browsers that won't work with a lib are reported as not
supported and older browsers syntax error. This is the best case
situation for graceful degradation.

<URL: http://forkjavascript.org/browserSupport.html>

I hope to add Konqeror and older Safari browsers to the testing in the
future.

The most important lesson I learned or that was reinforced was there is
no guarantee that even an extremely widely tested library will
necessarily run in a non-tested OS/Browser combination. The code may
give a run time error or may quietly not run as expected. There is no
knowing for sure...well I suppose you could do a very elaborate series
of tests after the window.onload event that manipulates the screen and
sends test XHR requests to the server. But these are probably not
realistic as they would annoy the user and load the server. Testing
will be a serious and ongoing part of Fork.

I have a list of things to document but I almost certainly won't be
touching the code before making the first release. Please give the code
a try in an exotic OS/Browser combination and let me know what happens.

To get the code right now use svn as described here

<URL: http://forkjavascript.org/download/>

and svn tag and zipped archive will be on the download page soon to
finalize the release/relief :)

Peter

[Peter Michaux]

Peter Michaux wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Five days, 11 libraries and 30-something browsers later and the testing
> is over. I learned some very interesting things about browsers over the
> last few days. XMLHttpRequest support has travelled along a very bumpy
> road that isn't quite smoothed out even now. Rails Ajax tricks are
> still a great idea but were too optimistic about how browsers handled
> HTTP when Rails RJS was released. Opacity is still not a definite go
> and computed style reporting is not reliable. Browsers on Windows XP
> use less memory than browsers on OS X.
>
> Here are the testing results. I'm happy with the degradation paths.
> Reasonably new browsers that won't work with a lib are reported as not
> supported and older browsers syntax error. This is the best case
> situation for graceful degradation.
>
> <URL: http://forkjavascript.org/browserSupport.html>

I moved the browser support URL to

<URL: http://forkjavascript.org/welcome/browser_support>

Peter

[Peter Michaux]

Peter Michaux wrote:
>
> and svn tag and zipped archive will be on the download page soon to
> finalize the release/relief :)

The zipped archives are now available. Minimized versions of the files
are included.

<URL: http://forkjavascript.org/download/>

That makes Fork release 0.1.0 official. Designed to run with Rails 1.2
and released on the very same day.

:-)

Peter