Moving Your Web Apps Into the Future

A number of tools have recently launched that can extend the capabilities of the websites you use today, while making it simpler to test their functionality.

The first one that caught our eye is Piggy Bank, an effort from the Simile project being jointly conducted by the W3C, HP, and MIT.

Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that extends the browser to allow it to navigate semantic content. Despite all the praise and critcisms for Semantic Web ideas, very few practical implementations have been created by which average developers can find out the potential of these technologies for themselves. Piggy Bank is a good way to combine and work with information from a large number of websites, and can act as a complement to the techniques we've mentioned in the past that let you rip, mix and burn the web.

Once you've gotten all your applications connected together, you'll need to test them. Though it's still a fairly new project, one of the most promising systems we've seen for testing web apps is Selenium. A simple, browser-based test tool, Selenium lets you do browser compatibility testing and system function testing just by creating some very simple HTML scripts to guide the tests. It's a powerful concept that's hard to understand the value of, so check out the demos yourself if you want to get a better understanding.