I'm happy to announce our first contribution to the jQuery ecosystem. Our brand new project called jQuery Address brings the deep linking functionality to jQuery and hopefully is going to simplify one of the most common tasks for JavaScript developers. In other words it provides an API for creating direct links to specific Ajax states and enables the Back and Forward buttons of the browser.

jQuery Address is a direct port of the SWFAddress library which has become a standard in the Flash world and has been used on many high profile websites. It supports all the major browsers and degrades flawlessly in a small percent of unsupported versions. This first release ships with 2 samples that showcase the different ways to utilize the plugin (API sample) and how to use with jQuery UI (Tabs sample). The next steps we're planning include documentation, SEO samples and integration with the SWFObject plugin.

The work on the plugin started a few months ago but so far I wasn't able to find the time to release it. It's my first serious work that involves jQuery and I'm open for suggestions, critiques and comments. I had great time learning the library and writing the most expressive code ever. The good thing about the plugin is that it has much smaller file size compared to SWFAddress but it also does not target Flash content at this point.

I hope that our experience in this field will be valuable to many jQuery users. The plugin already contains all the improvements included in the upcoming SWFAddress 2.3 which is we're planning to release tomorrow.

Download jQuery Address 1.0

The new SWFAddress has just arrived after seven months of active development, various contributions and lots of positive feedback from the community. The list of changes includes the following:

• Refactored JavaScript implementation
• New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
• New CS4 based Splash screen sample
• New Digg API sample
• New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
• New XSS protection that doesn't affect special characters
• Support for Internet Explorer 8
• Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
• Improved title handling
• Improved unload event handling for IE
• Updated Rails sample
• Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
• Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
• Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
• Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
• Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
• Cross platform build script
• Various optimizations

I believe that this new version is pretty stable and won't require an update soon. There are two known Safari bugs (19202 and 20355) that currently affect the project and we can only hope that they will make it's way into the next major release of the browser.

SWFAddress has grown significantly in the last two years and it's very likely that we're going to provide a lite version for users who need just the basic functionality. Very soon the same API will become available for Silverlight and we're also scheduling the development of a jQuery plugin.

Happy holidays!

A sweet new SWFAddress sample that utilizes the Digg API just went live this morning. I wanted to create a simple Ajax based showcase for the project and I almost accomplished the goal. The complexity of the code is a little bit higher than I originally wanted but I hope that most of the people will be able to understand it.

The sample uses a dynamic script tag inclusion in order to access the Digg services in a cross-domain fashion. It lists the popular posts in the Technology section, does paging and shows post details.

Go check it out.

During the past few months I started learning and testing how the robots execution standard applies to our website and specifically to the SWFAddress SEO techniques that we promote. The SWF indexing has drawn attention recently with the announced partnership between Adobe and Google but at the moment it's still pretty basic for our needs. We decided that we want to stick with plain indexable HTML and forbid the SWF experiments that Google are currently doing. The robots.txt that we're finally using looks like this:

In addition to the SWF files we also disallowed the indexing of our data sources. Once again I want to mention that the existence of a sitemap is important.

A cool new library for Google Analytics tracking was released yesterday at Adobe MAX. I learned about it thanks to webmonkey and I wonder why still there is no such info in the Adobe feeds.

So far the tracking of page views and events using the free Analytics tool from Google was pretty straightforward but still hard for many Flash developers. Basically it requires you to include a few lines in the HTML, call some JavaScript from Flash and eventually watch for security restrictions. The nice thing about this new project is that now it will allow you to do all this with just ActionScript. The quality of the library absolutely exceeded my initial expectations and I couldn't resist to not blog about it. You don't have to miss it if your projects require such functionality.

I'll be looking into integration between SWFAddress and GA for Flash in the near future. It won't make it into the upcoming release but I'm definitely interested in playing with it.