Web Tech Blog

XNA

ardrian2009 — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:31:13 +0000

Microsoft XNA (‘XNA’s Not Acronymed’ [1]) is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates computer game development and management. XNA attempts to free game developers from writing “repetitive boilerplate code”[2] and bring different aspects of game production into a single system. [3] The XNA toolset was announced March 24, 2004, at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. A first Community Technology Preview of XNA Build was released on March 14, 2006. XNA Game Studio 2.0 was released in December 2007, followed by XNA Game Studio 3.0 on October 30, 2008.

Gecko, a layout engine

ardrian2009 — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:12:03 +0000

Gecko is a layout engine currently developed by Mozilla Corporation, known as the layout engine of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla Application Suite, Nvu, Mozilla Thunderbird and many more. It is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Camino, Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Netscape 9, Lunascape and Epiphany to display web pages and, in some cases, an application’s user interface itself (by rendering XUL). Gecko offers a rich programming API that makes it suitable for a wide variety of roles in Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers, content presentation, and client/server.[1] Development originated with Netscape Communications Corporation, but soon moved to the Mozilla Foundation for the Mozilla application suite, and now used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and or the Mozilla Corporation, as well as many other open source software projects. It was also used in later Netscape Navigator releases. Gecko is written in C++ and is cross-platform, and runs on various operating systems including BSDs, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, OS/2, AIX, OpenVMS, and Microsoft Windows. Its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Licensed by a tri-license of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Gecko is free and open source software. Gecko is the second most-popular layout engine on the World Wide Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), and followed by WebKit (used by Safari & Google Chrome) and Presto (used by Opera).

AJAX

ardrian2009 — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:19:30 +0000

Ajax, sometimes written as AJAX (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages and better quality of Web services due to the asynchronous mode. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous.