Issue #58 - December 23, 2011
Since many of you will be getting this right before (or even during) the holiday season, I was hoping for a short and sweet issue today. But you've been sending in so much awesome stuff that it's almost as long as usual.. sorry :-) Happy holidays!
Headlines
Node Summit - San Francisco, January 24-25, 2012
Digging node.js? There are still tickets available for Node Summit, a 2 day Node-focused conference taking place in San Francisco in January. Speakers include Ryan Dahl (creator of Node.js), Scott Guthrie (Microsoft) and Stephen Herrod (CTO of VMware).
Backbone Fundamentals: CC-licensed Book about Backbone.js
Addy Osmani - he of many excellent JavaScript articles in 2011 - is working on a Creative Commons licensed book about Backbone.js. It's a work in progress but there's already quite a bit to see.
Public Beta of Wakanda (JS IDE + Framework) Available
Wakanda is a new open source platform for building webapps entirely in JavaScript, front end to back, comprised of an IDE, server, and framework. The public beta is now available for both Mac OS X and Windows.
20 Sites That Pushed JS To The Limit in 2011
Articles
Fake Operator Overloading in JavaScript
This is borderline messy but awfully clever.. Dr. Axel Rauschmayer demonstrates how to 'sort of' overload some of JavaScript's operators on your own custom objects. A fun hack that makes for a fun read.
JavaScript as a First Language
John Resig of the Khan Academy talks about the academy's intentions to teach computer science fundamentals using JavaScript and looks at both the problems and potential solutions involved.
Lazy Evaluation of CommonJS Modules
Tobie Langel notes that lazily evaluating JavaScript only when it needs to be run by putting it into strings or even comments can lead to significant performance gains. It's based on an idea the mobile GMail team had a couple of years ago.
vnc.js: How to Build a JavaScript VNC Client in a 24 Hour Hackday
Brian Geffon of LinkedIn presents an interesting overview of the ideas involved in his recent implementation of a JavaScript-based VNC (remote desktop) client at LinkedIn's first public Intern Hackday. Oh, and it's open source too.
JavaScript Character Escapes
Mathias Bynens looks at the ways that special characters can be rendered in JavaScript by using 'escapes', including the typical single character backslash escapes through to octal sequences, hexadecimal and unicode escapes.
The Switch: Python to Node.js
Paul Querna of Cloudkick explains why his development team switched from Python to Node.js for implementing most of its backend services. An interesting story.
Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck
Want a bunch of simple techniques and tricks to improve and optimize your jQuery code? Scott Kosman lays it on us.
The Problem with Implicit Scoping in CoffeeScript
Code and Libraries
Hogan.js: JavaScript Templating Engine (by Twitter)
The folks at Twitter have put together Hogan.js, a JavaScript templating engine. You can use it as a part of your asset packager to compile templates ahead of time or include it in your browser to handle dynamic templates. The examples are short and sweet.
audiolib.js: Audio Toolkit for JS
audiolib.js bills itself as a 'powerful toolkit for audio' written in JavaScript. It can do reverb, high/lo pass filters, delays, generate noise, sampling.. and a lot more. I haven't been able to play with it yet but it sounds ambitious.
18 Excellent and Useful jQuery Plugins
Yep, the old fashioned list posts that it's trendy to hate ;-) But, heck, there are some good entries here, and it's a great way to plug some gaps in your exposure to new plugins.
Duino: An Arduino Framework for Node.js
Arduino is an open source electronic prototyping platform and Duino is a Node.js-based framework by Cam Pedersen for interacting with your Arduino projects using JavaScript.
FlowSlider: jQuery Plugin for 'Sliding' HTML Content
jQuery Geo - An Interactive Mapping Plugin
Animated Text and Icon Menus with jQuery
A Code-based Demo of Scoping in CoffeeScript
Job o'the Season
Senior UI Developer (with Search Experience) at Salesforce.com [San Francisco, CA]
Last but not least..
CodeSchool Launches 'A Sip of CoffeeScript'
CodeSchool is an online video-driven interactive programming education site and they've just unveiled their new CoffeeScript course. It's a commercial system but the first part can be taken for no cost. If you want to sign up with CodeSchool though, I got them to offer JSW subscribers a discount (link below). I make no commission or anything on this, it's just for fun.
JS Weekly Subscriber-only CodeSchool discount link (mentioned above)