The big news for the JavaScript world today came out of the Firefox development team. They working on a new JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey called TraceMonkey. This is going to have huge implications for building RIAs with JavaScript and will expedite the death of both Flash and Silverlight. Why use a plug-in when you can get this kind of performance in just the browser.

This is all slated for Firefox 3.1, so it is still early, but this, along with development in the Safari Webkit space, are going to make the JavaScript world a very interesting place to be.

More gory details can be found on Andreas Gal’s blog post about it.

So I had to ditch my PHP mistress for a bit and come back to the real world. I spoke tonight at the Spring Dallas User Group, giving a presentation on the ExtJS JavaScript library and integration with Spring MVC. We had close to 20 people in attendance, which was more then I expected given the short notice.

Erik Weibust and I had discussed me presenting to the group several months ago. I orginally planned to present in July, but vacation plans got in the way of the meeting date. In the interim, quite a bit happened in the ExtJS world. The fallout from the change to GPL from LGPL had simmered down, and they released a new version.

The presentation went well. Some folks had worked with ExtJS while others were learning about it for the first time. In spite of the turmoil from the license change, I’m still very excited about it. The 2.2 release added some cool stuff and I’m looking forward to digging in to it on a project.

For those in attendance, or the simply curious, I’ve attached the presentation, sample project and my own Spring JsonView implementation. Note that for the sample project, you will need to download the ExtJS distribution yourself and place the contents of it in the web/resources/ext directory. I didn’t want to redistribute ExtJS in my sample.

ExtJS Presentation

ExtJS/Spring Demo Project

Custom JsonView Project

About every three months I’ll go through a phase where I’ll get pissed off at Java and take a look at the Dark Side (.NET). This usually lasts a week or two, until I come to my senses, drop my technology mistress and go back to the reliable runtime I’ve known and loved for years. Java has been a forgiving language, and she has taken me back every time.

This time, I’m finally fed up with both of them at the same time. I’m tired of overly-complicated middleware that does not improve things for the users. If someone uses the word “framework” again when talking about either language, I’ll throttle them with my bare hands. I’m looking for simplicity, the cheap thrill that allows me to focus on the layer that adds the most value for the users – the UI.

I’ve dabbled with Ruby on Rails, but she is an opinionated, foulmouthed mistress. Good for the five minute quicky site, but not a stack you’ll want to associate with the next day. She quickly gets bitchy and difficult if you don’t want to do things exactly her way.

Perl and ColdFusion both seemed kinda cool for about 10 minutes before I came to my senses. Python is just too wierd, and she’s been around the block almost as many times as RoR. And I couldn’t get past the sytnax.

My current programming language mistress is the language all “serious” developers love to hate: PHP. Why PHP? It allows me to focus on my UI without the wasted hours of feeding a bloated middle-tier layer. I’m using the CodeIgniter framework (dammit!, said it myself), and am tickled pink with how easily it allows me to pull everything together. No thousand-line XML config files, just simple productivity.

I might come to my senses again and go back to Java, or I might not. I’ve found a fun-loving, forgiving mistress in PHP/CodeIgniter who just wants to get it on, so it might just be time to move on.