Issue #36 - July 22, 2011
Welcome to issue 36 of JavaScript Weekly. I'm really ill and on a week of bed rest, so apologies that this issue is a little 'thinner' than usual.
Also, a big thanks to Smashing Magazine for featuring JavaScript Weekly last week and a big welcome to any new subscribers coming from there.
Headlines
Peepcode Released 'Backbone.js Basics' Screencast
If you're not familiar with Peepcode, they make high quality instruction screencasts and this time they're covering
Backbone.js, the MVC app-structuring library.
DOMBuilder 2.0 Released: Easier Dynamic HTML Creation from JS
Articles
JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Part 2
Scott Hanselman recently said that 'JavaScript is assembly language for the Web' and got a lot of comments in response. So he's asked some JavaScript gurus what they think.
Visual Studio + Sass + Less + CoffeeScript = Web Workbench
Ivan Towlson shows off the 'Web Workbench', a free Visual Studio extension (yep, Windows only) that adds highlighting support and auto-generation for Sass, Less, and CoffeeScript.
Tilt: Visualize your Page's DOM Tree in 3D (Firefox only)
Code and Libraries
TameJS:
From the creators of OkCupid comes Tame, a JavaScript extension that makes event-driven code easier to write, read, and edit. Check out the example code on the homepage.
ClojureScript: Clojure to JS Compiler
ClojureScript is a Clojure to JavaScript compiler by Rich Hickey. Clojure is a modern dialect of the Lisp language.
CoffeeTable: A CoffeeScript Console For Your Pages
CoffeeTable is a drop-in workbench for experimentation. It provides a CoffeeScript-fluent console on a page, with persistent history and auto-suggest.
jQuery.declare: ActiveRecord-like Scope Declaration in JS
jQuery.declare is a library that provides 'scope' declaration like in Ruby's ActiveRecord. It can be used for declare scopes and behaviors that can be arbitrarily attached to DOM objects. See the example code to get the idea.
JavaScript Koans: Learning JS By Fixing Failing Tests
Unfortunately you have to install it manually for now, but JavaScript Koans is an interactive learning environment that uses failing tests to introduce students to aspects of JavaScript in a logical sequence.
Fusker: Proactively Protecting Node Apps Against Attacks
Node-Fusker is a young project that aims to prevent and proactively respond to a multitude of 'attacks' that your Node.js app may encounter. Caution: The 'responses' Fusker gives attackers are mostly non-worksafe.
miniTip: An Ultra-Light Tooltip Plugin for jQuery
pubsub.io: a query based message hub
Last but not least..
HiveJS: Simple JS Form Builder for OS X
HiveJS is an integrated environment for easily building JavaScript-based forms without requiring knowledge of HTML, CSS or the intricacies of DOM manipulation. It's still in alpha and very bare bones.