A bunch of interesting things have happened to DWR recently. I did a tech-talk for TheServerSide waay back last JavaOne which has taken a while to get up on the net, but it's up at last.

The first book to contain a significant section on DWR is out. It's called Professional Ajax, by Nicholas C. Zakas, Jeremy McPeak and Joe Fawcett.

JavaWorld has another article out on DWR - this time about creating Google Maps mashups. It's well worth a read ...

I've been on a quick trip to Stockholm to give a seminar on DWR for Crisp. I was quite surprised how many people there were there with only me for entertainment for 3 hours! From there I went to a castle in the middle of Denmark to the Javagruppen conference (pics) along with the Ajaxian guys which was also good fun.

The next trip is out to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience in May.

How many large-scale projects became a huge success despite not having any developer documentation?

How many large-scale projects became a miserable failure despite having reams upon reams of developer documentation?

The important thing is understanding and not documentation. Too often we write documentation because the process tells us to, and too rarely we write because we are trying to explain something to someone.

Alexa have been providing stats on web page hits for ages. I was looking at the effect Venkman has had on Getahead when I noticed that there is stuff that the image generation page can do that you don't get from the web interface. Plus the web interface could do with some Ajax goodness rolling over it. So here is my quick Alexa/Ajax* web-reach hack.

Note: If you are reading this through an RSS reader then you probably need to try looking at the original. I really hope this page doesn't work in your aggregator because if my Javascript gets to your screen unchanged then you have a very bad XSS security hole.

One new thing is the ability to compare more than one site at a time. So here is a comparison of the reach of some Java open source development sites:

You can also update it dynamically so you can also compare getahead.ltd.uk, the home of DWR with dwr.com the home of trendy furniture. One day maybe ...

(UPDATED: Alexa got me confused with another site (gascoignes.net) recently and deleted some recent stats so the graph has getahead on a bit of a roler coster ride in the past few weeks. From what I can tell gascoignes.net gets no traffic, so it doesn't skew the results at all.)

You can also use it to compare some other sites reaches: (These links are clickable in IE)

• Java News Sites (The growth of Ajaxian.com is fairly impressive)
• Tech News Sites (Test ElReg's claims to greatness)
• The big boys
• Java open source development sites
• Who's the greatest DWR.

Finally you can use this page to create you own comparisons.

Have fun.

Site 1:
Site 2:
Site 3:
Site 4:
Site 5:

What comparisons have you found interesting?

* I'm using a broad definition of Ajax before someone gets picky about use of XHR.

Update: Mike Linksvayer has done a similar thing, however his has a few more options. It's worth checking out.