Recently in Web Development (July Edition)

Web development is an industry that’s in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday.

In this semi-frequent series of articles, we’ll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump!

---

News

All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla.

jQuery 1.6.2 Released

Almost every seems to be using jQuery these days and version 1.6.2 of the library is now out. This is the second minor release on top of jQuery 1.6 and lands a number of fixes for bugs. The version is already up on a number of oft used CDNs so using the new version is just a switcheroo away!

Read more

JS Bin 2.8.0 is Out

Remy Sharp’s JSBin is a fantastic tool for debugging — by yourself or with a team. JS Bin 2.8.0 brings with it live previews, resizable panels and autocomplete among many others.

Read more

IE10 Platform Preview 2 Released

Internet Explorer is on the path to standards redemption and they see IE10 as their asnwer. The IE10 Platform Preview 2 has been released and includes support for CSS3 Floats, HTML5 Drag-drop and File reader API among a lot more.

Read more

WordPress 3.2 now available

The new version of WordPress ships with a ton of new features including a super focused, writing mode, a refresh of the dashboard, a new HTML5 theme and performance improvements among others. Be sure to update your installations!

Read more

Code Release: Backbone.js 0.5.0

Along with a slew of tweaks and bug fixes, the most notable new feature is HTML5 “pushState” support, which you can see in action by trying a search in DocumentCloud’s public archive.

Read more

Google Web Fonts v2 Released

Version 2 of Google Web Fonts has been released. This release includes a ton of new functionality including better searching and filtering capabilities and, of course, many more fonts.

Read more

Google Releases Flash to HTML5 Conversion Tool

The tool, named Swiffy, was made available on Google Labs. You can upload a SWF file, and Swiffy will produce an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari.

Read more

Node 0.5 Out in the Open

Version 0.5 of the highly acclaimed NodeJS environment is now out with a number of new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Check out the link below to see the full changelog.

Read more

NodeJS on the way to Windows

In more Node related news, Microsoft has officially partnered with Joyent in porting NodeJS to the Windows platform. The resulting binary is expected to work with versions as far back as Server 2003.

Read more

Nettuts+ Releases Apps for Web Developers

Not to toot our own horn but recently we’ve started releasing custom made desktop apps that are tailor made for on web developers. Hit the link below to find out more!

Read more

---

New Kids on the Block

As web developers, the sheer amount of resources we can tap into increases exponentially with time. Here is just a quick look at some recently created resources that deserve your attention — everything from new books to scripts and frameworks.

Guider.JS

Guiders is a JavaScript library for visually enhancing your web application with guiders. A guider is a dialog box that guides a user through your application. This improves the user experience of a web application by visually introducing the user to important features.

Read more

Paper.JS

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Read more

smoke.js

A framework-agnostic styled alert system for JavaScript. Lightweight, flexible,uses CSS3 animation and is easy to use.

Read more

CoffeeKup

If you like CoffeeScript, then you’re really go love CoffeeKup. It’s basically HTML markup as CoffeeScript!

Read more

jsPlumb

jsPlumb provides a way to “plumb” elements of a UI together. It can be used with jQuery, MooTools or YUI3

Read more

Meow

jQuery Meow mimics Growl notications. It supports all jQuery events and you can bind it to various sources for message input making it ideal for form validation, Rails flash notices, or a replacement for the alert() box.

Read more

SocketStream

A phenomenally fast real-time web framework for Node.js, SocketStream is a new full stack web framework built around the Single-page Application paradigm. It embraces websockets, in-memory datastores (Redis), and client-side rendering to provide an ultra-responsive experience that will amaze your users.

Read more

VisualSearch.js

VisualSearch.js is a rich search box for real data. It enhances ordinary search boxes with the ability to autocomplete facets and values for sophisticated searches.

Read more

---

Interesting Reads

Often, you’re not really looking for a tutorial as much as you’re looking for a rant, an opinion or just the musings of a tired developer. This sections contains links to precisely those — interesting posts from the developer community.

Can a local variable’s memory be accessed outside its scope?

A great discussion with an extra fun analogy to explain memory management.

Read more

Why is JSON so popular?

A quick look into why JSON gained so much marketshare compared to its more enterprise-y competitors.

Read more

JavaScript is Dead. Long Live JavaScript!

An indepth look at the JavaScript platform by Peter Michaux

Read more

Evolving the Google design and experience

The Google team writes about the recent redesign of the entire Google ecosystem. Not really developer oriented but a good, quick read.

Read more

The Node Beginner Book

A fantastic resource for the NodeJS beginner.

Read more

---

Monthly Spotlight

Every month we’re going to highlight a specific tool that we think deserves a special mention. This month it is…

Microjs

Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you.

Read more

---

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s about all the major changes that happened in our industry lately. Since this is the first of its kind, everything is still up in the air " future editions will be shaped by your feedback.

Do you want us to cover more standard news? A focus on upcoming scripts maybe? Or just more interesting posts and discussions from the community? Let us know in the comments and thank you so much for reading!