Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture. Today we're going to discuss an effective set of patterns for large-scale JavaScript application architecture.
The material is based on my talk of the same name, last presented at LondonJS and inspired by previous work by Nicholas Zakas. Who am I and why am I writing about this topic? I'm currently a JavaScript and UI developer at AOL helping to plan and write the front-end architecture to our next generation of client-facing applications. As these applications are both complex and often require an architecture that is scalable and highly-reusable, it's one of my responsibilities to ensure the patterns used to implement such applications are as sustainable as possible. I also consider myself something of a design pattern enthusiast (although there are far more knowledgeable experts on this topic than I).
Can you summarize this article in 140 characters? In the event of you being short for time, here's the tweet-sized summary of this article: What exactly is a 'large' JavaScript application? Blog Archive » CoffeeScript: Why I’m never writing Javascript again. Posted: February 14th, 2011 | Author: Adam | Filed under: CoffeeScript, Javascript, programming | 22 Comments » If you program in Javascript and haven’t heard of CoffeeScript yet, you are missing out.
I’m not going to talk about installing it or the basic usage of it as the original documentation and a few blogs already have talked about it. What I want to talk about is why it’s so amazing and why I can never write Javascript again. I’ve been programming Python for quite a while now and when you do work on the web (like with Django) you will eventually have to deal with the browser and if you want to do anything beyond basic form processing you’ll need to deal with Javascript.
The maturation of libraries like jQuery has made life, infinitely easier but, Javascript itself is still a strange little language. CoffeeScript is essentially a combination of a Ruby-esque syntax and a healthy dose of just the good parts from Javascript. Node.js chat server in CoffeeScript. Csg.js: Constructive Solid Geometry 3d Modeling in JavaScript and WebGL. Evan Wallace, the same guy who brought us that amazing WebGL water simulation is back at it again, this time with a library called csg.js for doing Constructive Solid Geometry modeling in JavaScript.
Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) is a modeling technique that uses Boolean operations like union and intersection to combine 3D solids. This library implements CSG operations on meshes elegantly and concisely using BSP trees, and is meant to serve as an easily understandable implementation of the algorithm. All edge cases involving overlapping coplanar polygons in both solids are correctly handled. From the sounds of it, he wants to eventually build a 3D CSG level editor in the browser similar to UnrealEd (used by the amazing Unreal engine) and Hammer (from Valve).
Very cool! Here is an example of its usage: As you can see, this creates a cube and subtracts a sphere from it. With this code: And then combines them all together into the final image: With only this code: