On the Interwebs, number 16

Some websites I have found interesting recently (in no particular order):

(Whew! This is a long one! Apparently I waited a little too long to post these!)

Sammy — A Sinatra inspired framework for making browser based javascript applications. This is seriously cool. (Don’t confuse this with server side javascript applications. This is for writing an application that lives entirely in a browser.)

Mail — What appears to be a spectacular Ruby library for checking/sending/generating/parsing emails.

Identity in the Browser — A very cool mockup of what it would look like if logging-in and managing accounts on websites was built into the browser. This feels like a hint of the future. And I can’t wait! Putting the controls in the URL bar makes perfect sense.

View Cookbook for SQL Jockeys — An explanation of CouchDB views for SQL people. Honestly, while this was helpful, I need a lot more examples before I am going to truely get this map/reduce stuff for CouchDB.

Using files from web applications — Mozilla’s documentation on a new javascript feature that allows you to access files without having to upload them to a server first. Bit by bit browsers are aquiring the tools to completely replace native apps. I can’t wait!

LABjs: new hotness for script loading — A new library for getting your javascript files to download more quickly. I take a different approach (which is to make sure I am only using 1 javascript file) but this looks pretty useful for larger applications that have lots of dependencies.

An interesting 404 error — Seems like it would only be interesting to people who are familiar with HTTP status codes, though.

And now some Node.js links (I’m grouping them here in case you aren’t interested in my latest obsession):

Video: Node.js by Ryan Dahl: Video of the talk whose slides I linked to last week. The talk honestly doesn’t add that much to the slides (he did some good work with those!) but it is really fun to put a face to the person.

restler — A super simple library for making HTTP requests from Node. I don’t need this currently, but this looks like everything I would want.