Yesterday at OSCon, Prentice Hall announced the launch of the Sourceforge Community Press.  It is a special line of eBooks (called Shortcuts) that feature open source projects and are written by the developers themselves.

It is my pleasure to announce that one of the four titles available at launch is the ThinWire Handbook: A Guide to Creating Effective Ajax Applications, co-authored by yours truly.  It is available now for the price of $12.99 as a downloadable PDF, and it is also available through the Safari Bookshelf.

In the book, Josh Gertzen and I provide an overview of the entire framework.  Our goal is to describe the essence of each piece that makes up the complete framework, as well as to document features that may not be obvious to most developers.  So, if you’re into that sort of thing, go pick up download a copy, and start learning the awesomeness that is ThinWire.

As soon as I heard the announcement, I downloaded the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows.  So far I'm pretty impressed.  The memory usage seems to come in between Firefox (the worst) and Opera (the best).  ThinWire, my web application framework, works beautifully.  Gmail works fine, but Yahoo Mail has some issues (I get lots of JS errors).

I did a quick performance benchmark.  ThinWire has a Grid component that can display lots of data.  I fired up my benchmark app for the Grid, and added 10,000 rows.  Here's the performance results:

• Internet Explorer 7: 1 minute 33.66 seconds
• Opera 9: 27.93 seconds
• Firefox 2: 23.24 seconds
• Safari 3 Beta: 18.91 seconds

Also, while the Grid was loading, the rest of the app was still responsive; I could even start browsing and scrolling the Grid.Also, a quick look in the install directory reveals some interesting libraries.  WebKit was there as expected, but also CoreFoundation (Apple's base C library) and CoreGraphics (the main OS X graphics library).  Very interesting.