Issue #11 - January 28, 2011
Welcome to issue 11 of JavaScript Weekly.
This week's top news
Zepto.js v0.4 Released – JSONP & More DOM Goodness
Thomas Fuchs has released Zepto 0.4, a feature-driven update to his minimalistic framework for mobile WebKit browsers based on jQuery syntax. 0.4 brings JSONP AJAX requests, Blackberry detection, and more methods across the board.
jQuery 1.5 Release Candidate 1 Released
No, not a duplicate from last week. That was the 'beta' and this is the 'release candidate'! The difference is that more issues have been ironed out and barring any major bugs, the code in a release candidate is frequently the same as what is eventually shipped. Try it out.
This week's top articles
Tutorial: A Sencha Touch MVC application with PhoneGap
A comprehensive tutorial that walks through building a basic, but entire, iPhone application using JavaScript with PhoneGap and the Sencha Touch library. It doesn't exactly look native but it's not far off.
ECMAScript 5 strict mode in Firefox 4
Chris Heilmann of Mozilla takes a look at ECMAScript 5's strict mode, the motivations for using it, and gives plenty of code demonstrations along the way. A must read if you want to keep up with the latest JavaScript techniques.
Super Scary JavaScript Line Noise
OK, I had to come up with a different title on this as the syntax heavy title this article had might break the newsletter ;-) It's an article showing off some extremely scary line-noise style JavaScript syntax. Enjoy!
The Changelog Interviews Adam Moore and Satyen Desai of YUI
The Changelog team (great podcast, btw) caught up with Adam Moore and Satyen Desai from the YUI team to talk about YUI 3, Node.js, and working with Douglas Crockford.
Modern JavaScript Development: Boris Moore talks jQuery Templates
Unstoppable JavaScript blogger Addy Osmani presents a six minute screencast introduction to jQuery templates (using jQuery-tmpl) by Boris Moore of Microsoft.
What W3Schools Doesn't Teach You: JavaScript Variable Scoping
Istvan Miklos Antal looks at a flaw in W3Schools' 'JavaScript Variables' page and corrects some misconceptions about variable scoping in JavaScript.
25 jQuery Slider Tutorials
Marvi Ocampo presents a list post of 25 different jQuery-powered slider related tutorials.
Interesting new libraries and code
PhantomJS: Minimalistic Headless WebKit-based JavaScript-Driven Tool
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser packaged as a JavaScript-driven tool. It can be used in command-line utilities that require a full browser stack, or even as the basis for testing rich Web applications. There are lots of great examples!
WireIt: A JavaScript Wiring Library
WireIt is a JavaScript library to create 'wirable' interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages (think Yahoo! Pipes) or graph editors. Some examples are provided, including one that looks particularly like Yahoo! Pipes.
long-stack-traces: V8 Stack Traces in User-Land JavaScript
long-stack-traces gives you long/detailed stacktraces in Google V8 and is implemented in user-land JavaScript. It supports Chrome/Chromium and Node.js. It's a bit technical to explain here but click across for usage examples.
Python Compiled to JavaScript and Running In Your Browser
An interesting experiment where CPython, the standard Python implementation, has been cross-compiled from C to JavaScript and is shown running live in your Web browser. Clever stuff.
jPlayer: Cross-Browser jQuery Media File Player
jPlayer is a jQuery plugin that plays and controls media files on Web pages, allows you to stylize a player with CSS, and which supports all major browsers on the major platforms, including iOS.
A JavaScript Job in Germany
JavaScript Developer [Frankfurt, Germany]
Zynga (of Farmville fame) is looking for top-of-their-game JavaScript developers to work at its German office on the technology both in and behind their current and forth coming games. This is a great opportunity to get your code in use by hundreds of millions of players worldwide.