706 posts tagged “javascript”
2006
Introducing the Technorati Link Count Widget. I’m trying this out; it’s pretty sweet. Nicely unobtrusive too.
Tamarin
On Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced the Tamarin project, an open-source ECMAScript virtual machine based on the ActionScript engine used by Flash Player 9.
[... 380 words]Dojo 0.4 release notes (via) GFX (a 2D drawing API) is awesome; dojo.html.metrics looks extremely useful, and onDomLoad is always nice.
Browser JavaScript in Opera. Opera monkeypatches some sites, and auto-updates the patches once a week.
XMLHttpRequests using an IFrame Proxy (via) Another scary hack abstracted away by Dojo.
Notes on JavaScript Libraries
@media 2006 was a blast. Great talks, great people and some of the highest production values I’ve ever seen at a conference (check out the bags!).
[... 682 words]Fjax: Just say no
To my utter amazement, a decent amount of buzz appears to be building around a new “technology” called Fjax—much of it centred around this interview on Webmonkey, but also benefiting from a mention on the O’Reilly Radar and of course the obligatory Digg story.
[... 879 words]Brad Neuberg introduces dojo.storage. Incredibly technically impressive, embodying months of accumulated expertise.
Speaking gigs
I’ve been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK’s Beers and Innovation series.
[... 304 words]An S3 AJAX Wiki. Les continues to innovate against S3.
JavaScript apps with read/write access to S3. JS apps hosted on S3 could read and write to the store.
Learning Flash for programmers?
I’ve decided it’s about time I learnt some Flash, mainly because of the exciting opportunities posed by the Flash-JavaScript bridge. It’s become pretty obvious now that Flash is the most practical option for dealing with audio and video on the Web, and the bridge means that anything Flash can do is now available to JavaScript as well. Google Finance and the Yahoo! JS-Flash Maps API are just two recent examples of why this stuff is worth knowing more about.
[... 138 words]Form Hijack (via) Neat unobtrusive JavaScript trick—use document.onclick to catch events before page has loaded.
My ETech JavaScript tutorial
I gave a three hour JavaScript tutorial at ETech this morning, aimed at people with previous programming experience who hadn’t yet dived deep in to JavaScript as a programming language. It seemed to go pretty well—some good questions were asked at various points and a few people told me afterwards that they had found it interesting.
[... 247 words]Yahoo! UI JavaScript treats
The Yahoo! Developer Network was updated yesterday with a veritable gold-mine of Exciting New Stuff, coinciding with the launch of the brand new Yahoo! User Interface Blog.
[... 576 words]Yahoo! UI Library. Open Source JavaScript widgets and libraries.
Escaping regular expression characters in JavaScript
JavaScript’s support for regular expressions is generally pretty good, but there is one notable omission: an escaping mechanism for literal strings. Say for example you need to create a regular expression that removes a specific string from the end of a string. If you know the string you want to remove when you write the script this is easy:
[... 519 words]2005
The Dojo Manual (via) Dojo finally gets some really good extensive documentation.
Don’t be eval()
JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design.
Rich Text Editing With Dojo. Utterly fantastic. Beautiful API, and it even works in Safari.
TurboDbAdmin. Ajax phpMyAdmin clone built on Dojo. Worth trying the live demo.
Firefox 1.5 developer highlights
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out, and is the most exciting browser release in a very long time. It comes with the Gecko 1.8 rendering engine, which includes a ton of interesting new features. New in this version (unless you’ve been tinkering with the Deer Park series):
[... 719 words]Understanding the Greasemonkey vulnerability
If you have any version of Greasemonkey installed prior to 0.3.5, which was released a few hours ago, or if you are running any of the 0.4 alphas, you need to go and upgrade right now. All versions of Greasemonkey aside from 0.3.5 contain a nasty security hole, which could enable malicious web sites to read any file from your hard drive without you knowing.
[... 809 words]Staying social
June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won’t be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn’t stretch that far) but I’ll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.
[... 174 words]Stuart’s book
I meant to mention this earlier, but Stuart’s book, DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, has been published. I worked as a technical editor on the book, and I’m proud to have been associated with it. Don’t worry about the hairy title (apparently you have to have DHTML in it or bookshops won’t know where to put it / people won’t know what it’s about), the inside is pure gold. In their usual style, SitePoint have posted the first four chapters online for your perusal so you don’t have to take my word for it, you can try it out for yourself.
Firefox Counter. How the Firefox counter works.
Safari 1.3 has a JavaScript Console
My single biggest complaint about Safari in the past has been its terrible support for JavaScript debugging. Safari 1.3 has just been released, and tucked away in the Debug menu is a brand new JavaScript console option. It’s not as good as the Firefox equivalent (it throws up far too many “Undefined value, line: 0” errors for my liking) but it’s a big step in the right direction.
Flickr without the Flash
One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team’s assigned technology.
[... 353 words]Ajax forest, Remote Scripting trees. Brent Ashley, father of the JSRS library, kicks in on Ajax.
Greasemonkey: Hacking the Web with JavaScript. Greasemonkey rocks! Here’s a simple tutorial from Michael Moncur.