Items tagged javascript in 2009
Filters: Year: 2009 × javascript × Sorted by date
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. # 30th December 2009, 6:23 pm
tipsy. Simple Facebook-style tooltip plugin for jQuery. # 30th December 2009, 6:21 pm
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. # 23rd December 2009, 2:44 pm
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). # 17th December 2009, 11:24 am
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. # 17th December 2009, 7:46 am
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. # 8th December 2009, 11:07 pm
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. # 5th December 2009, 5:31 pm
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... # 2nd December 2009, 6:30 pm
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. # 26th November 2009, 12:52 pm
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. # 26th November 2009, 12:28 pm
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. # 24th November 2009, 9:06 am
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.
[... 2009 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. # 18th November 2009, 8:06 am
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. # 17th November 2009, 6:07 pm
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application. # 17th November 2009, 1:09 pm
node.js. “Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript”—a JavaScript environment built on top of the super-fast V8 engine which provides event-based IO functionality for building highly concurrent TCP and HTTP servers. The API design is superb—everything is achieved using JavaScript events and callbacks (even regular file IO) and the small standard library ships with comprehensive support for HTTP and DNS. Overall it’s very similar to Twisted and friends, but JavaScript’s anonymous function syntax feels more natural than the Python equivalent. It compiles cleanly on Snow Leopard. Definitely a project to watch. # 9th November 2009, 11:25 pm
It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There’s a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan’s Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem natural, and Closure even uses Acme, the Dojo CSS selector engine.
— Alex Russell # 6th November 2009, 7:35 am
Introducing Closure Tools. Google have released the pure-JavaScript library, apparently used for Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. It comes with a powerful JavaScript optimiser tool with linting built in and an accompanying Firebug extension to ensure the obfuscated code it produces can still be debugged. There’s also a template system which precompiles down to JavaScript and can also be called from Java. # 6th November 2009, 7:33 am
Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. Write a plugin for YUI3, BSD license it and sign a CLA and Yahoo! will push your module out to their CDN and make it loadable using the YUI().use() statement. They’re coordinating the submissions using GitHub. # 4th November 2009, 11:14 pm
JSLitmus. “A lightweight tool for creating ad-hoc JavaScript benchmark tests”. Includes an ingenious hack for graphing the results—it generates a Google Chart, then provides a TinyURL for viewing that chart in the future. The TinyURL is generated by pointing an inconspicuous iframe at the TinyURL API and letting the user copy-and-paste the resulting shortened URL directly out of the iframe. # 28th October 2009, 5:11 pm
Underscore.js. A new library of functional programming primitives for JavaScript—each, map, all, any, inject, detect etc. Unlike some similar libraries this one doesn’t extend the built-in objects, instead opting to bind the new functions to the underscore symbol. A jQuery-style noConflict() option is available if even that is too much namespace pollution for you. # 28th October 2009, 5:08 pm
Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC. Justification for inventing a brand new serialisation protocol: Thrift and Protocol Buffers both use IDLs and code generation, XML “is not convertible to a simple unambiguous data structure in any language I’ve ever used” and JSON lacks support for unencoded binary data. The result is BERT—Binary ERlang Term—which extracts a format from Erlang in much the same way that JSON extracted one from JavaScript. # 21st October 2009, 10:11 pm
Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It’s horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it’s far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team. # 8th October 2009, 5:52 pm
breaking links. Mike complains about sites such as Twitter and WordPress.com which mess around with Ajax and links and hence breaks the ability to command-click to open a new tab in Safari (and Chrome). I just realised that I’ve subconsciously retrained myself to right click and select “open in new tab” to avoid that exact issue. # 8th October 2009, 8:26 am
YUI 3.0.0: First GA Release of YUI’s Next-Generation Codeline. YUI 3 has some very neat ideas—everything is dynamically loaded, so you start with a tiny bootstrap script and call YUI().use(’module-name’) to load just the code you need. Congratulations to the team. # 29th September 2009, 11:38 pm
Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency. Cheeky iPhone optimisation trick—parsing 200 KB of JavaScript takes an iPhone 2.2 device 2.6 seconds, so Gmail embeds code components in /* comments */ in a script tag and evals them on demand later on when the features are needed. # 23rd September 2009, 10:29 pm
JavaScript cannot save you. Even if it could, you should not let it, for the price of this short-term salvation is the end of what you like about the web.
— Alex Russell # 19th August 2009, 11:33 am
On HTML 5 Drag and Drop. Francisco Tolmasky investigated HTML 5 drag and drop, which allows web apps to implement drag and drop between windows and between the browser and the desktop. He found a number of problems with the spec and proposes detailed solutions. # 17th August 2009, 12:31 pm
Scriptlets—Quick web scripts (via) From the prolific Jeff Lindsay, a pastebin-style tool for short server-side scripts written in Python, JavaScript or PHP that executes them within a Google App Engine powered sandbox. The Java code that implements the service is available on GitHub. # 13th August 2009, 1:51 pm
JSONP Memory Leak. Neil Fraser advocates iterating over and deleting every property on a JSONP script DOM node after you removeChild it from the DOM, to protect against memory leaks of “in excess of 15 MB per hour”. # 28th July 2009, 12:46 pm