A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript I believe the day-to-day practice of writing JavaScript is going to change dramatically for the better when ECMAScript.next arrives. The coming year is going to be an exciting time for developers as features proposed or finalised for the next versions of the language start to become more widely available. In this post, I will review some of the features I'm personally looking forward to landing and being used in 2013 and beyond. ES.next implementation status Be sure to look at Juriy Zaytsev's ECMAScript 6 compatibility table, Mozilla's ES6 status page as well as the bleeding edge versions of modern browsers (e.g Chrome Canary, Firefox Aurora) to find out what ES.next features are available to play with right now.
JavaScript Classical Inheritance If you have written a bit of JavaScript, you certainly have heard the word prototype. Prototype is not only a JavaScript library, but also a key concept of JavaScript, which we will explore in depth today, without making your head spin. (Almost) every object in JavaScript (where everything is an object, even functions) has an internal prototype property, which points in fact to a prototype object. When a method or property is missing on an object, it is searched on its prototype, and if not found on the prototype's prototype, and so on. the last object of the chain usually is Object.prototype. Sometimes the prototype is exposed with the __proto__ property, although this is not part of the standard. According to the EcmaScript specification, it is a private property.
Andrew McGivery Working with the modern web and APIs is great… if you are only supporting the most up to date browsers. If you need to support IE8, it gets tricky. IE8 has many restrictions on sending AJAX requests including not being a fan of Cross-domains requests, and http-https requests. Windows XP, that’s why. Windows XP is still a HUGE player in the OS game, and thanks to some decisions at Microsoft, if you are on Windows XP, you can’t upgrade from IE8 to IE9. Because of this, IE8 still manages to keep a 9.3% market share worldwide, 36.8% if your users are from china. Violin: Visualizing JavaScript This is an experiment in instrumenting JavaScript applications. On the right is the Object and Function graph for a simple Backbone app. The app's code has been instrumented to draw and animate the graph as the JavaScript runs without having to modify the app's original code at all (by hand anyway). Hit the button to start the backbone app and interact with it.
10 Useful jQuery Lightbox Plug-ins We are certain that you are already familiar with the concept of jQuery LightBox plugins. These plugins are basically used to focus the images, video or html content in a unique way on the webpage that you are currently viewing. There are many plugins available online for you to choose from and the best part is that they are pretty snappy because not a lot of coding is involved when these plugins are designed. Some of these plugins differ in features though as you will learn here.
A plain english guide to JavaScript prototypes - Sebastian's Blog When I first started learning about JavaScript object model my reaction was of horror and disbelief. I was totally puzzled by its prototype nature as it was my first encounter with a prototype based language. I didn’t help that JavaScript has a unique take on prototypes as it adds the concept of function constructors. I bet that many of you have had similar experience. But as I used JavaScript more I didn’t just learn to understand its object model but also started love parts of it. Thanks to JavaScript I have find out the elegance and flexibility of prototypes languages.
Spring Insight for Cloud Foundry Q. What is Insight? Insight is a byte-code instrumentation monitoring tool for development and production. The State of HTML5 Gaming Browser based Games Not that long ago, the idea of playing video games in your browser seemed like fantasy. Oh sure, we’ve had simple DOM card/board games and some Flash based games for quite a while (Elf Bowling anyone?) but nothing good built solely on HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Closure Tools The Closure Tools project is an effort by Google engineers to open source the tools used in many of Google's sites and web applications for use by the wider Web development community. Web applications have evolved from simple HTML pages into rich, interactive applications that provide a great user experience. Today's web apps pose a challenge for developers, however: how do you create and maintain efficient JavaScript code that downloads quickly and works across different browsers? The Closure tools help developers to build rich web applications with web development tools that are both powerful and efficient. The Closure tools include: How To Display Your Last Tweet Using Javascript And The Twitter API The other day I was working on a small project of mine, and it doesn’t use a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla. It’s just all html and css to style the pages. So I wanted to display my last tweet from twitter, and jazz it up using css. Now when people usually want to display their last tweet, and are running wordpress, they usually just install a plugin to do it for them. Now remember my site is only HTML and CSS.
Dynamic Languages Strike Back Some guys at Stanford invited me to speak at their EE Computer Systems Colloquium last week. Pretty cool, eh? It was quite an honor. I wound up giving a talk on dynamic languages: the tools, the performance, the history, the religion, everything. How Ender Bundles Libraries for the Browser I was asked an interesting Ender question on IRC (#enderjs on Freenode) and as I was answering it, it occurred to me that the subject would be an ideal way to explain how Ender’s multi-library bundling works. So here is that explanation! The original question went something like this: When a browser first visits my page, they only get served Bonzo (a DOM manipulation library) as a stand-alone library, but on returning visits they are also served Qwery (a selector engine), Bean (an event manager) and a few other modules in an Ender build. Can I integrate Bonzo into the Ender build on the browser for repeat visitors? What’s Ender?