642 items tagged “javascript”
2011
Qwery—The Tiny Selector Engine. A quarter of the size of Sizzle (1K gzipped and minified) due to only supporting ID, class and attribute selectors. Could be useful for things like embeddable widgets and badges, where depending on a larger library is impolite. # 2nd April 2011, 8:27 am
Before events took this bad turn, the contract represented by a link was simple: “Here’s a string, send it off to a server and the server will figure out what it identifies and send you back a representation.” Now it’s along the lines of: “Here’s a string, save the hashbang, send the rest to the server, and rely on being able to run the code the server sends you to use the hashbang to generate the representation.” Do I need to explain why this is less robust and flexible? This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
— Tim Bray # 10th February 2011, 6 am
The code injected to steal passwords in Tunisia. Here’s the JavaScript that (presumably) the Tunisian government were injecting in to login pages that were served over HTTP. # 24th January 2011, 6:45 pm
Why would someone browse the web with JavaScript disabled?
Security conscious users (who understand the implications of XSS and CSRF attacks) sometimes disable JavaScript completely, or use a tool like the NoScript extension to disable it for all sites and only re-enable it on a small whitelist of sites that they trust.
[... 67 words]Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy. # 13th January 2011, 8:38 pm
Are there any wikis that allow the use of JavaScript on wiki pages?
Such a wiki would be grossly insecure. That said, take a look at TiddlyWiki—it’s implemented entirely in client-side JavaScript and allows plugins to be implemented by pasting JavaScript in to a textarea.
[... 53 words]Why does Facebook chat use subdomains so aggressively?
Probably because it involves long-running connections. Browsers have a limit on the number of connections you can have open to the same domain at the same time (I think it’s 8 in most browsers these days). If Facebook chat opened a connection to www.facebook.com and you opened up 8 Facebook windows you would no longer be able to navigate to any more Facebook pages, since all 8 connections would be taken up by the long lived chat connections. By connecting to a different subdomain for each connection this problem can be avoided.
[... 107 words]What are the reasons that make jQuery more popular than MooTools?
MooTools is the only major JavaScript library that still thinks extending the prototype of built-in JavaScript objects is a good idea.
[... 44 words]What are the JSON security concerns in web development?
Be very careful when implementing JSON-P for authenticated actions—evil third party sites could assemble URLs to your user’s private data and steal it. This attack has worked against Gmail in the past.
[... 203 words]2010
What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications?
CoffeeScript is rather nice—it compiles to non-obfuscated JavaScript.
[... 27 words]Why do browsers allow cross-domain JavaScript to execute but not XMLHttpRequests?
It’s called the Same Origin Policy, and it’s principally about intranets. Imagine you have a URL http://intranet.corp/top-secret-...—and you then visit http://evil.example.com/ . If cross domain XHR was allowed the evil site could suck that secret document off your intranet without you realising.
[... 105 words]Porting Flickr to YUI 3: Lessons in Performance (at YUIConf 2010). Some very interesting tips here. The new Flickr photo pages suffered from what I’ve been calling “Flash of Un-Behavioured Content”, where slow loading JavaScript results in poor behaviour from some UI controls. They started using “Action Queueing”, where a small JS stub ensures a loading indicator is shown for clicks on features that have not yet fully loaded. Also, it turns out some corporate firewalls (Sonicwall in particular) dislike URLs over 1600 characters, and filter out any URL with xxx in it. # 10th November 2010, 6:33 pm
What is the best JS library for automated cropping?
Not entirely clear what you’re looking for, but if you mean a UI tool for letting people resize and crop an image Jcrop is really nice http://deepliquid.com/content/Jc...
[... 43 words]jQuery 1.4.3 Released. Once again, the thing that impresses me most about this jQuery release is how stable the core API is. Hardly any new methods added, but the existing methods are made faster, more flexible and more predictable. The same as been true for the past several releases as well. It just keeps getting more and more polished. # 17th October 2010, 12:15 am
Why do some websites implement their logout link as a form post via JavaScript versus a plain old GET request?
Probably because if you implement logout as a GET action, I can force you to log out of a site by tricking you in to visiting a page with an <img src="http://yoursite.com/logout/" width="1" height="1"> element on it.
[... 64 words]JS had to “look like Java” only less so, be Java’s dumb kid brother or boy-hostage sidekick. Plus, I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened.
— Brendan Eich # 16th October 2010, 8:25 am
Annotated backbone.js. Literate programming. # 13th October 2010, 5:24 pm
Backbone.js. As should be expected for a DocumentCloud project, Backbone is a concise, elegant and educational take on the JavaScript MVC pattern. Depends on Underscore.js and plays well with jQuery. # 13th October 2010, 5:23 pm
What companies are using Node.js in production in Texas?
There’s a list on this page: https://github.com/joyent/node/w...
[... 23 words]Why don’t more people use Google Web Toolkit for web development as opposed to scripting alternatives like JavaScript?
I’m morally opposed to GWT, because I don’t believe in building sites or applications that are entirely dependent on JavaScript to function. As someone who took the time to learn JavaScript, I’m also not at all convinced that Java is a more productive language.
[... 68 words]Why do so few companies use the Dojo Toolkit?
Dojo is fantastic software, but it does a lot more than the other libraries and consequently has a much higher learning curve. It’s advanced features may serve as something of a disadvantage for achieving more widespread adoption—most developers don’t need the more advanced abstractions provided by Dojo when they start their projects, and by the time they DO need that stuff they’ve already written a ton of code using another library!
[... 88 words]PaintbrushJS. Impressive open source JavaScript library from Dave Shea for applying image filters (sharpen, blur, emboss, greyscale etc) to the canvas element. # 9th October 2010, 11:53 am
Is there a modern, tested, reliable, standalone onDomReady function that isn’t part of a larger library?
I’ve just noticed that the original comment thread on Dean Edwards blog from 2006 is still open, and a comment by byron from January 2010 has a promising looking candidate: http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/...
[... 54 words]Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?
XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).
[... 96 words]The Web for me is still URLs and HTML. I don’t want a Web which can only be understood by running a JavaScript interpreter against it.
— Me, on Twitter # 27th September 2010, 4:37 pm
What is the largest production deployment of Server Side JavaScript?
I believe Flickr used to use Rhino for scripting the image processing (resizing, thumbnailing, sharpening) that was applied to every single uploaded photo. No idea if that’s still the case though.
[... 47 words]10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images. Fascinating hack: transform your JS and CSS in to coloured pixels, save the result as a PNG to benefit from PNG’s built in compression algorithms, then read the data back out of the PNG and convert it back to text using JavaScript and canvas—all to reduce the on-disk filesize when entering the 10K app competition. Alex’s GithubFinder entry is worth checking out too. # 23rd August 2010, 9:45 am
Polymaps. Absurdly classy: “a JavaScript library for image- and vector-tiled maps using SVG”. It can pull in image tiles from sources such as OpenStreetMap, then overlay SVG paths specified using GeoJSON. The demos make use of GeoJSON tiles for US states and counties hosted on AppEngine. The library is developed by Stamen and SimpleGeo, and released under a BSD license. SVG support in the browser is required. # 20th August 2010, 6:46 pm
Closure Compiler Service (via) A hosted version of the Google Closure Compiler (JavaScript minifier) running on App Engine. It has both a user interface and a REST API, which means you can use it as part of an automated build process without needing to set up a local copy of the software. # 9th August 2010, 1:17 pm