Review of top blog posts this year
Out of the 100+ posts on this blog, these are the best from 2006 and some interesting notes on why:
- While I generally think that 'opinion' blog posts are more interesting than 'news' blog posts, news is more likely to get people linking to you (so long as you are the source of some news). So my most visited post was my announcement of DWR 2.0RC1, because it was linked from everywhere.
- Hot Tip for getting more search action: Use the keyword "review" in a blog post header. It's something people search for, but not something that people commonly use in writing reviews. For a long time this ie7 article was a top hit for the search phrase
ie7 review, mostly due to lack of competition. - My post on Architect Level Interview Questions continues to get lots of link and search love. Looking back, I think the questions are probably a bit slanted towards the technical angle a bit too much. What do you think?
- More people have commented to me personally about the Airport Security article, which is bizarre because I usually stick to Java / Ajax topics. It's also got quite a few comments (for me at least) so it appears to be quite popular.
- Lots of people wanting to know about which Apache/Tomcat connector to use get directed towards my "mod_jk is dead" post, which questions mod_proxy_ajp. At least my post has lots of links to help people find what they really want.
- One of my favourites is my post about the Myths of Ajax and Accessibility. The post used to have a huge comment spam problem, so I've only just re-enabled comments. The post has a sister in my post about contradictory accessibity advice.
- The prize for my most under-rated post is on Writing Malicious Code in Java. The "answer" was given by Zsolt. I've temporarily removed his post so you can read the comments for clues if you want.
DWR 2.0 Release Candidate 1
It's been a long time coming, but we've at last updated DWR to a version 2.0 release candidate 1 status.
For the impatient:
There is a full run-down on the changes in the new and noteworthy documentation, however to whet your appetite:
JavaScript Proxy API
DWR can dynamically generate JavaScript from a Java API. This is done at runtime rather than compile time, so we can use it to remote control many browsers. This makes it very easy to write things like chat applications, or anything particularly dynamic. Messages are sent to clients using Reverse Ajax.
Reverse Ajax
DWR supports 3 ways to asynchronously transfer messages from the server to the browser: Comet (long-lived HTTP connections), Polling and Piggyback. Of these Comet and Polling are active (fast but require extra network traffic) and Piggyback is passive (slower but doesn't need extra network traffic). DWR automatically selects the best method transparently to the programmer.
Security
Two of the the biggest generic dangers to ajax applications today are Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), which most people are aware of, and the new tool in the hack-box: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). DWR helps you protect your site against these attacks by providing automatic protection against CSRF attacks for many configurations, and by defaulting to a mode where XSS attacks are reduced.
Check back here soon for more on CSRF and how to protect yourself against it.
Update: Jurgen Van Oosterwijck has blogged with more details about Reverse Ajax.
Walmart using DWR
It appears that Walmart have started using DWR, which is cool. It's not a total re-design around DWR, but one of the cool things about DWR has always been how well it has integrated with what you've already got.
Lots of the pages like this camera page have 
links that pop-up a dialog with more details, fetched asynchronously using DWR.
Does anyone know any of the developers of this feature, who could find out how implementation went?
Google Trix
Google Trix appears to be a service that Google have not announced much yet. The RSS feed for a Google Writely document includes the following image:
Unless they change it, you can catch it for yourself at http://docs.google.com/images/docs_logo_main.gif
Any ideas anyone?