»tools«

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don't go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces.

Dojo lets you prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax requests with the most powerful and easiest to use abstractions available. These capabilities are built on top of a lightweight packaging system, so you never have to figure out which order to request script files in again.

Along with Web 2.0 AJAX has been the other big software story of 2005. Here is what Dion Hinchcliffe aka. Mr. Web Two Dot Oh has to say at the freshly mounted AJAX Devloper Journal about Improved Techniques, Tools and Libraries, News and Resources, Critiques and Analysis, and so on a.s.o. ...

Google Transit Trip Planner enables you to enter the specifics of your trip—where you're starting, where you're ending up, what time of day you'd like to leave and/or arrive—then uses all available public transportation schedules and information to plot out the most efficient possible step-by-step itinerary. You can even compare the cost of your trip with the cost of driving the same route!

At the moment Google is only offering this service for the Portland, Oregon metro area, but they plan to expand to cities throughout the United States and around the world.

Jonathan Scott published a collection of useful Google Maps tools for finding your height above sealevel, location, time zone, local time, sunrise/sunset time and the distance between two places. Also contains a database of over 5.5 million place names to quickly find the place you want.

Nice done!

As recently announced, AutoDesk is going to contribute their web mapping software to open source community, soon.

MapServer enables developers to rapidly develop and deploy valuable spatial applications. It works with the latest PHP, .NET, and Java tools to quickly build powerful applications for Windows or Linux server environments. Developers can also publish spatial views internally, over the web, or using Autodesk’s DWF viewing technology for offline portability.

Gobby is a free collaborative editor based on libobby, a library which provides synced document buffers. It supports multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

... http://gobby.0x539.de/

MobiLife brings advances in mobile applications and services within the reach of users in their everyday life by innovating and deploying new applications and services based on the evolving capabilities of the 3G systems and beyond.

The project addresses with a strong user-centric view problematics related to different end-user devices, available communication networks, interaction modes, applications and services.

The MobiLife consortium consists of 22 partners in 9 countries, 5 application owners and SMEs, 3 operators, 8 manufacturers and 6 academic partners. MobiLife is part of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), which comprises several projects for IST.

15 months after the first public release, Ruby on Rails has arrived at the big 1.0. For those who haven't heard about it:

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.

Still not shure what Wiki to use for your own purposes? WikiMatrix has a good comparison matrix that shows (nearly) all aspects of the tools out there.

Dion Hinchcliffe put together a list of his personal choices of the top tools out there:

- Best Social Bookmarking Tool: del.icio.us
- Best Start Page: Netvibes
- Best To Do List: Voo2do
- Best Peer Production News: Digg
- Best Image Storage and Sharing: Flickr
- Best §rd Party Online File Storage: Openomy
- Best Blog Filter: Memeorandum
- Best Grassroots Use: Katrina List Network
- Best Word Processing: Writely
- Best Calendars: Calendar Hub

Wanna see all playes and runners up? Check his post at the Web 2.0 Blog.