Recently a bunch of technologies have been released and/or updated and I would like to mention a few of them briefly.
First and foremost, Silverlight 2 Beta 1 has finally been released and you may download it immediately. There is also an accompanying SDK. You can find a nice development tutorial series on Scott Guthrie's blog. If you are already familiar with WPF, you can just skim this entire series in less than 5 minutes. Given that this technology isn't the same as the full WPF and given that it's designed for the web, there will obviously be differences. It's important to remember that Silverlight 2 isn't simply WPF for the web. I would call WPF 3.5's XBAP support for IE/Firefox "WPF for the web". No, this is possibly the biggest web technology improvement since the release of Firefox 1.0, which in turn was the biggest technology release since the printing press. Alight, alight... since .NET 1.1. It's support for the dynamic language runtime is going to completely revolutionize our web development.
When reading through Scott's tutorial series (serious, at least skim it), it's interesting to note that Silverlight 2 allows cross-domain communication. It does this by reusing the Flash communication policy files. This is really awesome as it means that you can start accessing resources that Flash has been using for a while. Being able to dynamically access resources from different domains is critical to the success of web architecture in the future.
Speaking of cross-domain communication, John Resig and I received a very depressing e-mail the other day telling us horrible news: cross-domain communication will probably be removed from Firefox 3 before it's official release. Apparently a bunch of paranoid anti-architects were complaining about the dreaded evils of being able to access resources from different domains. Um ok. Fortunately, however, Firefox 3 has a feature called postMessage that allows you to get around this. Malte Ubl has produced a library called xssinterface to demonstrate just this concept. You could, of course, get around this completely with some iframe hacks or some other scripting magic.
Speaking of web browsers, I would like to bring people's attention to a technology that I've been following for some time now: Apple WebKit. This is basically the brains inside Safari. I absolutely love the Safari web browser. It's by far and away the easiest web browser to use. It also has the same keyboard short-cuts as Firefox, which is how I'm able to use it. It's also incredibly fast, but I should mention that it uses even more memory than Firefox. My last instance passed 500MB. Given it's lack of an extension or configuration (i.e. about:config) system, it's obviously no where near the same caliber as Firefox though. It is, however, my primary web browser as has been since October '07.
The reason I mention WebKit is because as very few people know, this is an open source project and has nightly binaries released on their webkit.org web site. One of the most interesting thing about nightlies that you can actually watch the progress of development as time goes on. About every month or so I like to get the latest Firefox nightly. It's always interesting to see the major experiments that the developers try about 2 months after a major release of Firefox. There's always some really awesome "teaser" feature in there that later grows into a fully grown technology. The same can be said for WebKit.
None of that is, however, my primary reason for mentioning WebKit. As, most web developers know, the Acid2 test has been the standard for checking a web browsers compatibility with the CSS standard. I've been pushing this test for a long time, but I've never pushed it as the only test. There are many things that a web browser must do and many features a web browser must have before it can be considered appropriate for use. Merely focusing on CSS, while completely ignoring DOM support, JavaScript, and general user usability can lead a browser to be as impossible to use as Opera 9.
As I've said time and time again, I'm not a CSS specialist. Part of the definition of being a professional web develop is that I have a solid understand of the inner workings of CSS including specificity, the various selectors, and how to merge absolute, floating, and relative position on the same elements, tasks "coders" see as nearly impossible to learn. However, my focus is on AJAX interaction as seen from the JavaScript and DOM worlds. Therefore, we need to have a test for browsers that goes beyond the simple Acid 2 test for CSS. I'm not the only one thinking this way, because recently the Acid3 test was published and it tests CSS, JavaScript and DOM support. This is the new standard for web browsers.
So far no web browser has even gotten close, with the lowest score from a web browser being 39% in Safari to the best score being 50% in Firefox 2.0.0.12. However, in terms of non-released software, Firefox 3.0b3 has a score between 59% and 61%, depending on its mood (update: b4 is steady at 67%) and the latest WebKit nighty has a score is 90% (watch WebKit progress on Acid 3 at http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17064). That's phenomenal! The newly released Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 has a score of 17%. Those of you who have naively praising the IE team for being YEARS late on getting near the Acid 2 test need to wake up and realize this is 2008. Time moves-- keep up. Firefox has been close for the longest time and has always had the next-gen's next-gen JavaScript and DOM support, but has only recently completely passed the finish line of the Acid 2 test. So, they are finally off my watch list there, but I will not stop bugging them until they pass the Acid 3 test.
For more information on the Acid 3 test, see John Resig's most entitled "Acid 3 tackes EMCAScript". He's about as passionate as I am for web standards and Firefox and his blog is an invaluable resource for all things JavaScript. His work is so good that I would like to take the time to plug his book he is currently writing: Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. I absolutely guarantee you that this book will redefine the entire world of JavaScript and will raise the bar incredibly out of the reach of "coders". To all of you coders who think you know JavaScript, do a view-source on the Acid 3 source code (you may want to bring a change of underwear with you).
Lastly, it's not necessarily a "new" technology, but it's so incredibly phenomenal that I need to mention it: Prototype 1.6. It's amazing to me that people actually go out of their way to use ASP.NET AJAX 3.5 (I still find the ICallbackEventHandler interface more productive). ASP.NET AJAX 3.5 is not nearly as bad as extremists think, but the design is still flawed. Prototype on the other hand is absolutely incredible. I've written about Prototype before, but this version 1.6 is even more powerful. There a A LOT of changes from Prototype 1.5. It's so good that I no longer call it "prototype/script.aculo.us". Script.aculo.us is a great animation system, but, honestly, the main reason I used it was for the DOM abstraction in the Builder object. Prototype now has an Element object to help create DOM objects, thus allowing me to remove Script.aculo.us from most of my projects (it's not as complete as the Builder object, but it allows object chaining-- which greatly increases code readability, conciseness and understanding!). The Template object is also amazing as it gives you the ability to go far beyond simple String.Format formatting. The new Class object for OOP is also great. It's so much easier to use than Prototype 1.5. Also, being able to hide all elements with a particular CSS pattern with one shot is very useful! (for example, $$('div span .cell-block').invoke('hide')). It even allows you to use CSS 3 selectors on the most dead of web browsers. It really makes developing for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 bearable! Even if I have to use ASP.NET AJAX 3.5, I'll still including prototype.js. If you do anything with JavaScript, you need Prototype!