Sites of the Week for March 15th 2013. Getting Into Ember.js. There are a lot of JavaScript libraries available, and most are really good at providing the traditional DOM-centric interactions that your typical websites need. But when it's time to build a manageable code base for a single-page app, that's where a whole suite of new frameworks come in to smooth things out.
The old saying is true: "Use the best tool for the task. " It's not that traditional libraries like jQuery can't help you build desktop-like experiences, it's just not the use-case for it and is missing things like data-binding, event routing and state management. Sure, you can probably cobble together a bunch of plugins to achieve some of that functionality, but starting with a framework that's been specifically built from the ground up to tackle these specific problems, in my opinion, makes more sense. I recently did an interview with the Ember.js team; it was motivated by my desire to get to know what I've come to call "the new hotness": Ember.js.
So let's kick this off. Templates. Pro Workflow in Laravel and Sublime Text. My Talk and Slides from jQueryTO. On March 2nd and 3rd, I attended and had the privilege of speaking at jQueryTO, Canada’s first ever jQuery conference. It was a really cool experience, and was especially cool because I finally got to meet in person certain developers that I’ve respected from afar for some time, including Darcy Clarke (who organized it), Paul Irish, Addy Osmani, Alex Sexton, and Adam J. Sontag. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile now, then you know that I have little, if any, business speaking at a JavaScript conference. So I tried to keep things fairly simple for myself and proposed a talk where I could focus largely on CSS.
The conference didn’t have any official recording going on, thus any footage of the talks is rare and not great quality. So for archival purposes, I’ve recorded my own talk with slides as a screencast, embedded below. A lot of what’s in this talk is stuff I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere, meaning it’s nothing ground-breaking for most of my readers.
Image credits: Relational Databases for Dummies. TDD Terminology Simplified. The core idea of Test-Driven Development (TDD) is writing tests before writing any functional code, and then writing only the least possible amount of code required to make the tests pass. It may sound strange to develop in this fashion, but it's actually quite useful, as the test base doubles as a partial specification of the main code. Given such a simple premise, however, there is an amazing amount of terminology and techniques. In this article, I gather the most important terms and buzzwords that you might hear, and define them. Acceptance Testing Test-first programming allows for high level functional tests. The highest level of testing validates that the software meets the customer's requirements. Assertion Assertions are statements that perform an actual check on the software's output.
Behavior Testing A testing technique that incorporates test doubles to the software, asserting that it calls correct methods in a correct order. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) See user story. Dummy Fake. Modular CSS with Media Queries and Sass. Most developers nowadays are recognizing that if you’re developing large applications that have different views and states, it is best to take a modular or object-oriented approach to your CSS development. When you throw media queries into the mix, however, the you can lose some of the benefits of modularity — code that’s easy to read, update, and maintain. Let’s look at different ways we can write our media queries, starting with what might be the most common approach — especially with those not yet using a preprocessor. The Common Approach To demonstrate what I think the majority of developers have done with media queries up to this point, here’s a simple example: In the first two rule sets in this example, we have two separate elements on the page styled without media queries.
(As a side point, those first two rule sets could be our mobile first styles, but it really doesn’t matter for the purpose of this theoretical example.) A More Modular Approach Pros and Cons Cons: Pros: Conclusion. The Whens and Whys for PHP Design Patterns. There are plenty of articles that explain what design patterns are, and how to implement them; the web doesn’t need yet another one of those articles! Instead, in this article, we will more discuss the and , rather than the and .
I’ll present different situations and use-cases for patterns, and will also provide short definitions to help those of you who are not so familiar with these specific patterns. Let’s get started. Every few weeks, we revisit some of our reader's favorite posts from throughout the history of the site. This tutorial was first published in October, 2012. This article covers some of the various , documented in Robert C. The factory pattern was invented to help programmers organize the information related to object creation.
Use a Factory Pattern when you find yourself writing code to gather information necessary to create objects. Factories help to contain the logic of object creation in a single place. When you need to retrieve or persist information. Okay, okay. 10 Free Mockup Backgrounds to Present Your Work. Uploading samples of your work to sites such as Behance or Dribbble is a great way of getting noticed, so it’s worth spending a couple of minutes adding some polish to your images so they stand out and catch the attention of viewers. This free pack of abstract backgrounds will help you enhance your designs by mocking them up on abstract backgrounds. The vibrant colours and subtle textures help complement your pieces and turn them into stunning pieces of eye candy.
This abstract mockup backgrounds pack contains 10 vibrant images to complement your portfolio pieces and create an eye catching presentation. Each file is made up with a vibrant range of colours combined with subtle textures and comes along in preset sizes for Dribbble shots and Behance & Portfolio uploads. Download the abstract mockup backgrounds These backgrounds are perfect for presenting design work to clients or mocking up a professional presentation for your portfolio. Windows Apps for Web Developers. When the editor of Nettuts+ requested an article to show Windows developers love by listing popular web development apps, I was all over it.
OSX devs get a lot of attention, so it's good to mix things up a bit. What I want to do is list the development tools that I frequently use as a web developer on Windows. It may not include your favorite, and if it doesn't, please let me know within the comments section. I'm always anxious to find new tools to enhance my workflow! Writing Code Visual Studio 2012 I wrote about Visual Studio before, and I think it's an awesome IDE. Web Essential Extension for VS2012 Thank goodness browser-based debugging tools have evolved to what they are today. This is the extension that makes Visual Studio great for web development. Mads Kristensen, the creator of the extension, is a rockstar! Sublime Text 2 It's the little editor that can. Browsers I shoot for cross-browser sites, so having the broadest possible coverage is key. Browser-Based Dev Tools Browser Extensions. Sites of the Week for March 8th 2013. Streamline your Process with Volo. Front-end developers face a variety of challenges when creating sites that have repetitive solutions.
All sites use a similar DOM skeleton, as well as many common features and attributes. Volo aims to remove some of the effort out of the process, allowing developers to focus on the new aspects of a project, as apposed to the same. If you add a JavaScript file that isn’t AMD compatible, Volo will try and convert it for you. Volo is an application that aids front-end developers by automating their processes. Volo was created with a very special relationship to GitHub; it understands GIT repos, as well as branches and tags. Volo was created by James Burke, the same James Burke that created the very popular require.js library. It may not surprise you that Volo has a very opinionated workflow; it assumes you want to use proper AMD for files, as well as providing presets on where to put files. Is this a bad thing? So let's begin by going through some of Volo's commands.
Creating Projects Volofiles. Check Out the New Recommended Resources on Nettuts+ We've added a new page to the site, which will help coders grab top quality software, tools and gear. It's filled with our favorite resources that we recommend for developers. You can jump straight over to our Recommended Resources page here on Nettuts+ or read on for further information. Hand Picked Resources for Coding Professionals Our Tuts+ editorial team has hand-picked these resources, which feature core applications, hosting recommendations, code resources, web services, and mobile apps. Keep an eye out for more of these site sections as our Resource pages roll out across the Tuts+ network. What Developer Tools Do You Recommend? This is version 1.0 of this Nettuts+ Resources page. Are there any awesome apps, tools, gear or services that you feel we missed?
Headless Functional Testing with Selenium and PhantomJS. Let's build a system for performing functional tests on web applications, using Selenium and PhantomJS. The resulting system will allow us to write easy test scenarios in JavaScript, and test those scenarios both in real browsers and a headless simulator. The obvious downside to Selenium is that it requires a full graphical desktop for any and all tests. To begin, we have to choose a browser control or emulation engine to simulate an end-user. For a long time, the primary player in this field was Selenium, and it still is. Selenium allows for automated control of real browsers on real operating systems, which is its primary advantage: you can be absolutely certain that the tests represent reality as closely as possible.
The obvious downside to Selenium is that it requires a full graphical desktop for any and all tests. As a result, your tests can become slow. Selenium can now control PhantomJS in the same way that it does any other browser. The choice is absolutely free here. Client.js: Responsive Design Is a Way Forward, Not for Everyone Though. February 26th, 2013 Author: admin Category : Responsive design 2 Flares Twitter 1 Facebook 1 Google+ 0 StumbleUpon 0 LinkedIn 0 inShare0 2 Flares × Responsive Web design has proved that it’s not a fad but a surefire way to the future – one that makes us daring, and responsible too.
But is it for you? Nobody knows what tomorrow holds for us. And thinking about it is often scary. But a progressive approach can certainly make things we do in the present last longer and serve the needs of tomorrow in just as awesome manner. Much of the credit goes to Ethan Marcotte for introducing one such approach – responsive Web design, which adapts itself as per the multiple viewing contexts, embracing the increasing adoption of web-enabled devices and hence viewing contexts. Benefits You can give a rich Web experience to users from all kind of mobile devices – known or unknown.You need not worry about content parity when going with responsive Web design. Challenges Is responsive design for you? 10 Time Saving Online Color Tools for Web Designers. Working with colors is a time consuming task for a web designer, for starters you need to pick out a color palette for your designs, then there’s all kinds of code values to remember and convert from hex to RGBa.
To speed things up and make the designer’s life much easier a bunch of handy tools are available online. These tools help you pick, choose and convert your color selections with ease for your next web design project. If you’re starting a design from scratch with no brand guidelines or colour inspiration it can be tricky putting together a colour scheme that works. Here’s a few tools that will help you put together a pretty combination of colours that are guaranteed to work. ColourLovers ColourLovers is home to millions of user generated color palettes. Browse the collection and pick out ones that inspire you, or find other colours that are a good match for a hue of your choice. Kuler Pictalulous Looking for a particular emotion, style or atmosphere from your colour palette?
Hexu.al. Best of Tuts+ in February 2013. Sites of the Week for March 1st 2013. Team Collaboration With Github. GitHub has become the corner stone for all things open source software. Developers love it, collaborate on it and are constantly building awesome projects through it. Apart from hosting our code, GitHub's main attraction is using it as a collaborative tool. In this tutorial, let's explore some of the most useful GitHub features, especially for working in teams, making it all the more efficient, productive and, most importantly, fun! One thing that I find very useful is integrating the Github Wiki into the main source code project.
This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with Git, the open source distributed version control system, created by Linus Torvalds in 2005. If you need a revision or a lookup on Git, do visit our previous screencast course or even some posts. Also, you should already have a Github account and did some basic functions such as creating a repository and pushing changes to Github. There are generally two ways of setting up Github for team collaboration: Your One-Stop Guide to Laravel Commands. In this day and age, it's quite normal for a developer to have an understanding of consoles, and how to issue basic commands. But what if you could code your own custom commands to improve your workflow? If we look back to Laravel 3, you might remember that it offered tasks. Tasks were extremely helpful, but still came up short for more complex operations.
Thankfully, Laravel 4 packs a beefed up Artisan that will make your life as a developer so much easier! What is Artisan? Artisan is the command line utility that was released in Laravel 3. If you're not familiar with Laravel, then you might not be aware of Artisan. Artisan offers many useful commands that can help you perform various tasks, such as generating migrations or publishing a package's assets. Artisan's Foundations This is where Artisan draws its power. In Laravel 3, Artisan was written from scratch by Taylor Otwell (Laravel's creator), thus it was quite basic (although still awesome). Common Questions Basics of a Command Options.
Speaking With the Ember.js Core Team. Single page apps are the new hotness; everyone's trying to figure out the easiest way to build them. But it's more than just finding a couple of controls to slap together and sprinkling Ajax pixie dust on it. Building scalable and maintainable apps is serious business, which requires serious tools. Ember.js is a very serious framework for doing just that. Check out the interview I did with Ember.js Core Team leads, Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale, as they discuss what prompted them to begin the Ember project, its design philosophy, and where it fits into an already crowded library ecosystem.
Q Tell us about your professional backgrounds. Yehuda: I was an Accounting major in college, with a whole bunch of interesting minors (Journalism, Philosophy, History, TV/Radio). I had rejected a computer science major on the grounds that it was too hard and "not for me," even though I had done a small amount of QBasic programming as a kid and some Visual Basic in college. Take bindings, for example. How To Clean Up & Optimize Your WordPress Install. The Holy Grail of Conference Talks: Live Coding. Sites of the Week for February 22nd 2013. Beginning Test-Driven Development in Python. Strategies for Testing IE on Different Platforms. Testing Like a Boss in Laravel: Models. Sites of the Week for February 15th 2013. When to Avoid the Descendant Selector. Understanding Design Patterns in JavaScript.
Setting Up A Staging Environment. Event Based Programming: What Async Has Over Sync. Contracts: The Practical Side of Semantics. Birdbook - Social Networking for Birders. Building Ribbit in Django. Ruby on Rails Study Guide: Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas. Using Web Debugging Proxies. Git Tips From the Pros.
Laravel 4: A Start at a RESTful API. Chrome Dev Tools: JavaScript and Performance. How To Create a Simple Collapsing Header Effect. How to Write Code That Embraces Change. “One Best Ways” to Make Your Website Future-Friendly. Sites of the Week for February 1st 2013. A Peek at Internet Explorer’s Developer Tools. Sublime Text 3 Beta Released. JavaScript ‘this’ in Different Contexts. Why You’re a Bad PHP Programmer.
Making Use of jQuery UI’s Widget Factory. Browsing Twitter Favorites From Talented Developers. Sites of the Week for January 25th 2013. Visual Studio: Web Dev Bliss. From Scrum to Lean. Ruby on Rails Study Guide: The History of Rails. Important Considerations When Building Single Page Web Apps. 25 Web Designs With Clever Fixed Header Effects. Better Workflow in PHP With Composer, Namespacing, and PHPUnit. Sites of the Week for January 18th 2013. Selecting the Right Programming Language Made Easier. PSR-Huh? An Introduction to Source Maps. Why 2013 is the Year of PHP. Web Development and Tech Email Newsletters I Subscribe to.
How to Use RequireJS with Backbone. Handy Tips For Creating a Cool Twitter Profile Design. Building Ribbit in Rails. Sites of the Week for January 11th 2013. SCRUM: The Story of an Agile Team. The First Ever Tuts+ Premium Sale. A Beginner’s Guide to HTTP and REST. My Current JavaScript Design Pattern. Best of Tuts+ in December 2012. How to Write a Laravel Bundle. Ways to Separate Good Drupal Developers from the Bad Ones. Sites of the Week for January 4th 2013. How I Test. Best Practices To Increase Your Mobile Commerce Sales. Learn Web Design The Right Way: Quit College And Start Sucking Blood [+VIDEO] TNTAnderson Web Design News. The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story.