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In ASP.NET development, F# also offers productivity advantages over VB and C#.  F# is different because it is statically checked and type-safe.  It addresses weaknesses in ASP.NET development like untyped values, complex form construction, and using strings for IDs and method names that connect markup with code-behind (class-files).  Writing a web application in F# on the WebSharper platform can be less-time consuming if a developer is not great at writing web apps in JavaScript.  Through WebSharper, developers can write a web app using a large subset of F# and .NET core libraries and then just let WebSharper map the code to JavaScript.  WebSharper can integrate with ASP.NET applications, but it is different from the standard approach because it builds applications from miniature web pages called "pagelets".  The pagelets correspond to functions on the client-side and they are automatically translated into JavaScript.   WebSharper supports a wide range of JavaScript libraries, making it easy for developers to optimize their code in whatever way they choose.  jQuery, qooxdoo, Flapjax, and Yahoo UI are all supported by WebSharper.  The leap from F# to JavaScript is manageable because both are functional languages that support lambda expressions and closures.  Another unique part of WebSharper is a "formlet".  A formlet is a special pagelet that provides form functionality.  Formlets in Web Sharper run and validate on the client, submitting their result to a either a client- or a server-side callback.

Orchard will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the CodePlex Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI. The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold: Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users , scripters, and developers A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through extensions and themes. Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew are two of the developers of Orchard. Do they look familiar? Sure they do. They used to be devs on the C9 team.

The World Wide Web Consortium has launched a new specification called "XProc," which provides a standard framework for composing XML processes.  It streamlines the automation, sequencing, and management of complex XML processes, the standards body said.  The "XML Pipeline Language" spec was developed to provide a framework for managing enterprise-level business processes.

Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out. HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.

Piotr Zalewa has created a really great playground, jsFiddle, for testing sample code and playing with the Web. With an area for the holy trinity of the Web (HTML, CSS, JS) and an output region, you can get right to hacking. It goes beyond this though. You can also add resources, an Ajax echo backend, and auto load from a slew of JavaScript frameworks. You can also check out the examples and see great stuff such as Processing in action. And the finishing touch, share and embed. Piotr wrote all of this using CodeMirror and MooTools. Nice! Having worked on Bespin, and developed a playground like this (looking forward to show a new mobile one soon!) I appreciate the work!

Building a dynamic PHP site requires you to understand how CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functions work. There are a variety of ways to implement these functions include databases, and most commonly through mySQL.  With these functions you can add new entries to the database (registration), view existing entries (retrieve users or fields), update the entries to your table or delete users (who may unsubscribe or permanently delete their accounts.) For a user account based sites, these functions are essential for keeping your user and information database up to date.

Sencha , formerly known as "Ext JS", has announced the beta release of Sencha Touch, an HTML5-based mobile application framework. Sencha Touch gives mobile application developers access to HTML5 technologies that can be deployed to both Apple and Android devices, while giving users applications that look and feels like native applications, with no need to download application updates. "HTML5 technologies are here, they're being adopted very quickly, and by the end of the year they'll be running on every mobile device that matters," said Sencha's Abe Elias. "As server and client frameworks continue to fragment, the mobile device industry has consolidated on the HTML5-capable Webkit browser as its default platform."

As PHP is not a strictly OOP language, it is very easy to slip into sloppier and more procedural code as well as program in PHP one's entire career and not deal with OOP at all. In this tutorial, I will cover the following: Why use OOP over procedural programming, as I have been doing?Encapsulation and modularityBasic class design

The Control Gallery is a directory of over 900 controls and components to use in your own applications. You will find everything from simple controls to full e-commerce components.

Google today launched an "early preview" of Dart, a programming language the company hopes will help Web application programmers overcome shortcomings of JavaScript that Google itself feels acutely.

We had to cover monads eventually, and there are many great monad tutorials out there (see, for example, here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads). In fact, there are web resources concerned solely with organizing the many monad tutorials available in the wild, and developing new monad tutorials seems to be a popular sport in the Haskell community.Today, Ralf Lämmel's lecture goes back to the roots, essentially revisiting Wadler's "The essence of functional programming"—the 1992 paper that discovered monads and popularized their use in functional programming. Ralf Lämmel's lecture and accompanying code distribution show Wadler's seminal insight: those original scenarios and observations still make sense today. Indeed, Simon Marlow (a Haskell/GHC high priest @ MSR Cambridge) recently noted: "it's still the best monad tutorial" (see http://twitter.com/simonmar/status/21397398061).

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.