Issue #39 - August 12, 2011
Welcome to issue 39 of JavaScript Weekly. Nothing specific for me to announce this week so let's roll straight on with the links :-)
Headlines
Node Up: A Podcast About Node.js
Node Up is a new Node.js podcast now up to its third episode. This time around it's hosted by Isaac Schlueter, Felix Geisendoerfer, and Paolo Fragomeni.
Brendan Eich on the Recent ECMAScript 6 Standard Meetings
JavaScript's creator, Brendan Eich, goes through the recent happenings at the ECMA TC-39 committee meeting held at Microsoft's Redmond campus.
Node v0.5.4 Released
The latest release of Node's unstable 0.5 branch is out. More Windows related improvements, some fixes, and a V8 upgrade are in store.
SproutCore 2.0 Beta 3 Released
Articles
Do JavaScript 'Script Loaders' Really Do Any Good?
Some JavaScript heavyweights, including Jeremy Ashkenas, Thomas Fuchs and Paul Irish, weigh in on an epic debate about the effectiveness of JavaScript 'script loaders' in making pages quicker to load. A great read.
Understanding JavaScript Function Invocation and 'this'
Yehuda Katz talks about how you can invoke functions in JavaScript going from simple functions up to member functions, binding, and even some jQuery specific concerns.
Mozilla and WebKit To Support Debugging Minified JS, CoffeeScript and other JS Languages
Both the Mozilla and the WebKit projects have started work on supporting SMAPs (Source Maps) in their debugging features which will make it easier to support non-JS or JS-variant languages.
jQuery Changes From 1.4.2 to 1.6
Anders Janmyr picks a few key changes and additions from jQuery 1.4.2 through to 1.6, including XML parsing, delegates, and deferred calls.
Find the jQuery Bug #1: Chicken or the Egg
The first in a new series of posts by Elijah Manor (once co-host of the official jQuery podcast) that show off some buggy jQuery-centric code and then walk through the process of fixing it.
Using Pow To Serve Up Your Node.js Project Through Ruby
Pow is a tool for OS X by 37signals that makes it easy to run Ruby webapps locally for development purposes. In this post, Assaf Arkin shows how to create a simple proxy so you can use Pow to serve up a local Node.js app instead.
Code and Libraries
Javascript Unit Test Environment (JUTE) Is Now Open
Mark Trostler notes that JavaScript unit testing lacks standardization. JUTE, however, combines the YUI3 testing framework, automatic dynamic code coverage, a web UI, a command line interface, seamless client- and server-side Javascript testing and 3 testing back ends in one simple package.
jQuery Boilerplate: Jump Start Your jQuery Plugin Development
jQuery Boilerplate is a short and snappy attempt at giving you some basic code from which to build a new jQuery plugin. We've covered it before but it now has a good looking official site.
Macros: Easy Definition of Pre-Processor Chains For Your JS Source
domready: The DOM Ready Code Extracted from jQuery
If you're writing JavaScript that can't depend on jQuery, but you'd still like to set code to execute only after the page is fully loaded, this tiny library should fit the bill.
Proxino: A Service to Optimize and Monitor your JavaScript
Proxino is a hosted service that catches exceptions in your JavaScript code as they occur. To do this, they dynamically proxy your JavaScript code (and minify and cache it along the way too, for good measure).
Lodis: Like Redis, But In The Browser
Lodis is essentially a clone of Redis, a popular advanced key-value storage daemon, but in JavaScript and runnable directly in the Web browser. A very interesting idea.
Sprite3D.js: 3D Positioning for Elements in Webkit
534 Ways to Reload The Page with JavaScript
Last but not least..
Annotated ECMAScript 5.1: The ES Spec, With More Links
Annotated ECMAScript 5.1 is a well-formatted HTML version of the formal ECMAScript 5.1 spec, the spec ultimately standing behind the latest versions of JavaScript. Unlike the canonical spec, though, it includes lots of helpful links to extra documentation and resources.
CreativeJS: A Gallery Site of Creative JavaScript and HTML5 Projects