Crisis Averted!

The folks over at iPhone Web Dev, a great resource for iPhone web application development, have forked Lace with a few little tweaks and made it play nice with the iPhone.

They've set up a live demo to play with (it works damn well), and have released the modified source to boot.

Well Lace, the little Ajax chat app, has had a decent run the past two years. Not only has Lace been downloaded over 40,000 times, it was also featured in the wiki/O'Reilly book Ajax Design Patterns. Not too shabby for some hastily commingled code tackling a relatively unoriginal idea.

Alas, the time has come to put Lace to rest. Interest in Lace has slowed, and I haven't had the time or the desire to give it the attention it deserves. As much as I hate to remove content, the blog and forum will be offline as of tonight. The Lace homepage will remain online, along with the most recent release downloads.

So long, Lace. It was fun while it lasted.

If you have been following Lace development here, you may be interested to know that the Lace Development Blog was recently launched to organize Lace related posts in one place.

From the Lace website:

One year ago today Lace was released to the public. With 6 releases under her belt and another coming very soon, she really has come a long way.

Read more...

Lace 0.1.5 is now available. Lace 0.1.5 addresses several issues including multibyte character support (mbstring), compatibility with older versions of PHP, and several data corruption issues.

Lace Demo

See Lace 0.1.5 in action.

Download

Download Lace 0.1.5

Changes in Lace 0.1.5

• Basic IRC-ish /nick command
• Some problem characters have been made illegal in nicknames: |<>!#%&*+
• Newlines in messages are now replaced with <br>, alleviating some data corruption issues. A side-effect is newlines within <code> tags are replaced as well.
• Missing multibyte functions no longer throw errors (e.g., mb_internal_encoding())
• Fixed uniqid() parameters for PHP < 5
• Fixed class member initialization for PHP < 4.3
• Fixed an issue where blank (zero-length) names in the data files caused "undefined offset" errors.

I just stumbled across the Amazon pre-order page for a new O'Reilly book, Ajax Design Patterns, based on Michael Mahemoff's Ajax Patterns wiki. It's set to be released on June 1.

From the Amazon description:

Ajax Design Patterns provides best practices for web developers by investigating how others have successfully dealt with conflicting design principles. You will find sections on foundational technology patterns, programming patterns, functionality and usability patterns, and diagnosis/testing of Ajax applications. Ajax is all about usability, so the patterns in this book focus on delivering usability in the face of constraints, such as user capabilities and expectations, bandwidth limits, the stateless nature of HTTP, and the complexity of Javascript.

I'm excited to see a wiki like this published in book form, especially an O'Reilly book. I'm also excited because Lace makes an appearance or two. It might not be much, but it's the first code I've written to be published in text form on such a massive scale.

Thanks to the work of Craig Cmehil, Lace is now an official Vanilla Add-on. Vanilla is an outstanding PHP-based forum application. Vanilla users, download Lace and get the Lace Integration Add-on!

Lace 0.1.4 is now available. Lace 0.1.4 brings more speed and other enhancements, as well as more code with potential bugs. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Lace 0.1.x codebase is horrifying to work on!

Lace Demo

See Lace 0.1.4 in action.

Download

Download Lace 0.1.4

Changes in Lace 0.1.4

• Scrollable message history
• Basic anti-flood protection
• Basic nickname hijack protection
• System messages now optional
• Unicode fixes
• "Line 655" bug fix
• Many speed improvements

I've only recently (within the last 2 weeks or so) began reviewing Lace's site statistics, and I was suprised at what I found. Of course, I've always skimmed the conversation logs now and again in search of helpful comments and constructive criticism…

As of this morning, Lace has been downloaded 1501 times. This may not be a lot by most standards, considering the first release was 8 months ago, but to me it's great. It's a good feeling to know that people are interested in even the smallest idea.

Thank you to everyone who downloaded it, pored over the code, slashed it to bits, installed it, hacked it, laughed at it, made it better and felt inspired. To those who did not like it, I thank you for at least giving it a go.

Lace 0.1.3 is now available. Lace is a free, lightweight Ajaxian communications engine suitable for a shoutbox, chat room or similar. Version 0.1.3 brings with it several bug fixes, a tiny bit of code reorganization and most importantly, an oft-requested User List.

Download

Lace 0.1.3

Changes in Lace 0.1.3

• User List. See who's currently chatting, when they enter, when they change their name, when they're idle, and when they've left.
• Code and directory structure slightly reorganized.
• Removed reliance on ForceType via .htaccess; switched to modrewrite for pretty URLs (optional).
• Lace form action attribute was hardcoded. It now honors LACEURL_REL.
• Several minor bugfixes/improvements.

Unless there are any major bugs, 0.1.3 will likely be the last release based on the 0.1.x codebase as we make way for Lace 0.2.