707 posts tagged “javascript”
2010
node-v0.1.30 (via) A very significant new release of Node.js: the Twisted/Dojo-style Promise abstraction has been removed entirely, causing backwards incompatible changes to a bunch of core APIs. This means the pseudo-blocking Promise.wait() method is gone too, making it even harder to accidentally block your event loop. Instead, user-level libraries are encouraged to add Promise-style abstractions. I’m pleased to see Node sticking to the low-level stuff.
do. A library for Node that adds a higher level abstraction for dealing with chained and parallel callbacks.
How To Node. New blog about Node.js, with a superb series of tutorials aimed at both experienced and new JavaScript developers. The stuff on managing callbacks (including running them in both series and parallel) is pretty eye-opening.
Plupload (via) Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing and drag-and-drop from the desktop. It achieves all of this by providing backends for Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 and Browserplus and picking the most capable available option.
Glitch is built in an entirely new and different way for a game. The back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we'll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.
— Glitch
Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas.
dogproxy. Another of my experiments with Node.js—this is a very simple HTTP proxy which addresses the dog pile effect (also known as the thundering herd) by watching out for multiple requests for a URL that is currently “in flight” and bundling them together.
Comet (long polling) for all browsers using ScriptCommunicator. More Comet from the Plurk team: 80 lines of dependency free JavaScript implementing long polling using script tags (hence working cross-domain) across IE6+, Firefox, WebKit and Opera. The clever bit is the code to detect loading errors. It doesn’t try to fix the infinite loading indicator problem—is that still a cromulent usability concern?
Plurk: Instant conversations using Comet (via) Plurk’s comet implementation sounds pretty amazing. They’re using a single quad-core server with 32GB of RAM running 8 Node.js instances to serve long-polled comet to 100,000+ simultaneous users. They switched to Node from Java JBoss/Netty and found the new solution used 10 times less memory.
jQuery source viewer. A neat way of browsing the source code of jQuery itself, complete with hyperlinks to other jQuery methods. Kind of a single-purpose IDE. I can see myself using this a lot.
HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg.
Hot Code Loading in Node.js. Blaine Cook’s patch for Node.js that enables Erlang-style hot code loading, so you can switch out your application logic without restarting the server or affecting existing requests. This could make deploying new versions of Node applications trivial. I’d love to see a Node hosting service that allows you to simply upload a script file and have it execute on the Web.
Dojo 1.4.1 vs jQuery 1.4.2pre on Taskspeed. John Resig’s reponse. When JavaScript libraries compete on performance, everybody wins.
Dojo: Still Twice As Fast When It Matters Most. Alex Russell shows how Dojo out-performs jQuery on the TaskSpeed benchmark, which attempts to represent common tasks in real-world applications and has had code that have been optimised by the development teams behind each of the libraries.
jQuery 1.4 Released. With comprehensive release notes. Huge performance improvements and a ton of very sensible enhancements to the API—far too many to summarise.
2009
qTip. Advanced tooltip plugin for jQuery, including borders and pointers created using CSS. Very flexible (we used this for the latest MP expenses application) but a little on the heavy side, weighing in at 38KB when minified.
tipsy. Simple Facebook-style tooltip plugin for jQuery.
Orderly JSON. Essentially the JSON equivalent of RelaxNG’s compact syntax—a pleasant mini-language for describing JSON objects which compiles to the more verbose JSONSchema format.
jQuery.require() implementation. John Resig has added a new jQuery.require() function to a jQuery development branch, for release as part of jQuery 1.4. The commit on GitHub has an extensive discussion attached to it (scroll to the bottom).
getElementsByTagName(). Dean Edwards rolls a hand-rolled getElementsByTagName function for use with DOM fragments (which don’t provide the method). His code is a nice example of a tightly written tree walker using the low level DOM API.
Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket. A neat exploration of Node.js—first hooking a “tail -f” process up to an HTTP push stream, then combining that with HTML 5 WebSockets to achieve reliable streaming.
jQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released. Impressively the new version contains no new features at all (correct me if I’m wrong), instead focusing on significant performance improvements to the existing API.
Google Analytics goes async. This is excellent news—the latest version of the Google Analytics JavaScript is designed to allow for asynchronous loading, so it won’t hold up the rendering of your page. Analytics and banner ads are the two worst offenders when it comes to slowing down page loads. Now if only a banner ad vendor would follow suit...
flXHR. I was looking for something like this recently, glad to see it exists. flXHR is a drop-in replacement for regular XMLHttpRequest which uses an invisible Flash shim to allow cross-domain calls to be made, taking advantage of the Flash crossdomain.xml security model.
LABjs: new hotness for script loading. Created in collaboration with Steve Souders, LABjs is a JavaScript loading library which makes it easy to have scripts download in parallel while still ensuring that they execute sequentially where required to ensure dependencies are met. It’s unclear how you would decide to use this over concatenating all scripts together in to a single file.
Request Routing With URI Templates in Node.JS. I quite like this approach (though the implementation is a bit “this” heavy for my taste). JavaScript has no equivalent to Python’s raw strings, so regular expression based routing ala Django ends up being a bit uglier in JavaScript. URI template syntax is more appealing.
Node.js is genuinely exciting
I gave a talk on Friday at Full Frontal, a new one day JavaScript conference in my home town of Brighton. I ended up throwing away my intended topic (JSONP, APIs and cross-domain security) three days before the event in favour of a technology which first crossed my radar less than two weeks ago.
[... 2,025 words]Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer. dynaTrace Ajax looks like an awesome tool. For once, Internet Explorer has a development tool that other browsers can be jealous of.
node.js at JSConf.eu (PDF). node.js creator Ryan Dahl’s presentation at this year’s JSConf.eu. The principle philosophy is that I/O in web applications should be asynchronous—for everything. No blocking for database calls, no blocking for filesystem access. JavaScript is a mainstream programming language with a culture of callback APIs (thanks to the DOM) and is hence ideally suited to building asynchronous frameworks.
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application.