Issue #31 - June 17, 2011

Howdy Javascripterinos (not the official collective term?), welcome to issue 31 of JavaScript Weekly. I've launched a JavaScript podcast with Jason Seifer this week at javascriptshow.com so check that out or see the end of this issue for more.

Headlines

The Little Book on CoffeeScript
The Little Book on CoffeeScript is a five chapter online 'book' about CoffeeScript that starts from bare basics and works up through syntax, idioms, and creating a quick outline of an application.

jQuery 1.6.2 RC 1 Released
John Resig has announced the first release candidate of the forthcoming jQuery 1.6.2. This keeps up the long line of rapid iterations we've seen from the jQuery team recently.

Jeremy Ashkenas and Brendan Eich on JavaScript's Future
CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich took the stage at JSConf2011 and gave a talk about JavaScript's future. It's an hour long, but a must-watch for sure.

Articles

JavaScript Memory Management
Van Miranda notes that long-standing assumptions about the life of a page are being challenged as full-page refreshes and traditional Ajax patterns are replaced with Ajax Navigation and client-side frameworks like Backbone and SproutCore. With this in mind, he looks at how you might need to think about your memory management in JavaScript a little more in future.

Using SproutCore 2.0 with jQuery UI
Yehuda Katz talks about SproutCore 2.0 and how it's designed to be trivial to drop a SproutCore app into an existing page. He shows us how to do a general-purpose integration with jQuery UI.

Node.js Is Backwards
Ankur Blogoyal analyzes some comments by James Duncan (chief architect at Joyent) about how Node's parallelism features differ from Erlang and how, perhaps, Node is merely being forced to work within significant confines. A lengthy debate pops up in the comment section.

How to De-Obfuscate Javascript Using Microsoft Tools

Installing JSLint on Eclipse IDE

Quick Thoughts on Concurrent JavaScript Execution

Code, Libraries and Tools

pdf.js: Rendering PDFs with JavaScript and HTML5
Chris Jones and Andreas Gal talk about their work on PDF.js, a new open source PDF renderer which works entirely in the browser. There's also a link to a demo where you can check it out live.

Wakanda: A New Webapp Framework and IDE with JavaScript Everywhere
Wakanda is a new, open source platform for building business-focused webapps entirely with JavaScript. It's a fully integrated solution, for example, you get an IDE and can visually design your datastore classes, models and UI.

GFX: CSS3 Transforms for jQuery
GFX integrates CSS3 transforms and transitions into jQuery, making it stupidly simple to create sophisticated and gorgeous animations.

YUI Compressor: Online
The Yahoo!-built YUI Compressor can compress/minify JavaScript files to a high standard but requires you download and install it. This page, however, gives you a Web based version you can use for one-offs or to see what sort of output YUI Compressor gives.

NodeCloud - Node.js Links and Resources
NodeCloud is essentially a long 'links page' with links to libraries, frameworks and tools that relate to Node.js in some way. There's not much more to it than that but it's a worth a flick through if you're looking for inspiration.

Language.js: Experimental PEG Parser
Language.js is an experimental new parser based on PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar). It's still very new but worth a look if you're into parsers or are a language-nut generally.

jQuery Plugin Boilerplate (Revisited)
Two months ago I linked to Stefan Gabos' initial jQuery plugin boilerplate/template. Since then, he's given it some significant updates and it's even easier to get going with it now.

Log.io - Real-time Log Monitoring from Your Browser

selfDoc.js: JavaScript That Documents Itself

Job

Bioinformatics Startup seeks Full-Stack Engineers in The Mission, San Francisco
WellnessFX is a well funded early stage startup building a platform that will revolutionize how we manage our health. We're on the hunt for strong full-stack developers well-versed in modern Javascript and Rails development to join our experienced development team. Opportunities abound to build fat clients and visualize rich bioinformatic datasets.

Last but not least..

The JavaScript Show: A JavaScript Podcast
The JavaScript Show is a new JavaScript news podcast by me, Peter Cooper, and Jason Seifer, my co-host on The Ruby Show (a Ruby and Rails podcast). We're three episodes in so far and we cover similar things to JavaScript Weekly.