721 posts tagged “javascript”
2007
CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS. CouchDB is a fascinating project—an Erlang powered non-relational database with a JSON API that lets you define “views” (really computed tables) based on JavaScript functions that execute using map/reduce. Damien Katz, the main developer currently works for MySQL and used to work on Lotus Notes.
Freebase. Out of closed beta, although you still need an invite code to contribute. I hope they drop the JavaScript requirement for viewing content on the site.
Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”.
jQuery 1.1.4: Faster, More Tests, Ready for 1.2. The backwards compatibility policy for 1.2 is pretty clever: provide a plugin that restores removed functionality (such as XPath selectors).
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself.
Live Query jQuery plugin. Ingenious plugin that lets you register jQuery event bindings to be executed when a new element matching the provided selector is added to the DOM. Performance is kept snappy by only running the check after a jQuery DOM manipulation method has been executed (append, prepend, attr etc); it won’t notice elements added using regular DOM methods.
Fixing GC issues on IE 6: New IE download. Microsoft have released Windows Script Host / Script Runtime version 5.7, which apparently cleans up a bunch of IE 6 memory leaks.
Learning jQuery. An entire year’s worth of jQuery tutorials, split in to beginner, intermediate and advanced.
Operation Aborted. Another fantastically obscure IE bug: appending new elements to the HEAD element breaks if a BASE tag is present.
Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate. Prototype gets a long-needed update to its Event API, and some interesting new Function.prototype extensions.
Some Notes on the YUI Rich Text Editor. Dav Glass explains how he achieved the impressive feat of building a rich text editor widget that also works in Safari.
Lazy Function Definition Pattern. Neat JavaScript trick: redefine a function the first time it’s called, for example to switch in different browser implementations based on object detection.
jQuery for JavaScript programmers
When jQuery came out back in January 2006, my first impression was that it was a cute hack. Basing everything around CSS selectors was a neat idea (see getElementsBySelector) but the chaining stuff looked like a bit of a gimmick and the library as a whole didn’t look like it would cover all of the bases. I wrote jQuery off as a passing fad.
[... 2,608 words]Background Iframe (bgiframe). jQuery plugin that inserts an iframe shim behind an element in IE, allowing the element to be positioned overlapping a select box without the select box showing through.
SproutCore (via) MVC JavaScript framework used to build the new .Mac Web Gallery application.
CodePress. “Real Time Syntax Highlighting Editor written in JavaScript”.
jQuery in 15 minutes. A quick introduction I put together. Much more interesting in conjunction with Firebug powered demos.
The Wii Remote API. “allows the Web page to detect all Wii Remotes that are connected to the Wii [...] this makes it possible to make Web pages interact with up to four users at the same time, a concept not normally possible with traditional JavaScript event detection.”
YUI 2.3.0. New components are a rich text editor, dojo-style package loader, lazy ImageLoader, colour picker and unit test framework. Easier skinning as well.
Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0. Steve Chipman’s excellent debugging bookmarklet created back in 2005—includes useful keyboard shortcuts for quickly manipulating the DOM of the current page.
XRAY web developer’s suite (via) Smart new bookmarklet from westciv—kind of like Steve Chipman’s MODI but with the addition of the canvas element for box model visualisation.
YUI-based Image Cropper Widget. Nice implementation of a useful widget.
The recent announcement that Mozilla's next JavaScript engine, Tamarin, will also be a container for functionality written in Python and Ruby (and, one assumes, beyond) is proof that JavaScript is the new Parrot.
Mozilla and IronPython: IronMonkey. Interesting to note that all three new Mozilla projects are being lead by experienced Python developers.
Brendan Eich: New Projects. Exciting new projects from Mozilla. ActionMonkey is joined by IronMonkey (IronPython/IronRuby on Tamarin) and ScreamingMonkey (Tamarin for IE). Upgrading IE’s JavaScript using the Flash Player as a vector is a game-changing idea.
ActionMonkey (via) SpiderMonkey + Tamarin = ActionMonkey. New JavaScript engine for Mozilla 2, incorporating code from Adobe’s Open Source ActionScript VM.
Building Brickslayer. New tutorial from Michal Wallace on building games in JavaScript using Prototype.
Conflicting Absolute Positions. Neat technique, although it uses CSS expressions for IE compatibility so it may break down in IE 5 and 6 when JavaScript is disabled.
Low Pro Behaviours 101. A neatly packaged method of enhancing an existing DOM element with pre-packaged behaviours.
J4P5: Javascript For PHP 5 (via) “J4P5 is a JavaScript interpreter written in PHP 5, that allows to run untrusted scripts in a sandbox on your server. It aims to implement most of Ecma-262 3rd edition.”