Issue #66 - February 17, 2012

Headlines

Essential JavaScript Design Patterns for Beginners
Addy Osmani has released an updated version of his popular JavaScript design patterns book online. ePub and PDF formats will be ready for the 'end of this week' but for now, enjoy this Web version.

The 2012 JS1K Contest - Do Your Best in 1KB of JavaScript
The 2012 run of JS1K is currently taking place. Wow your fellow developers in just 1KB of JavaScript and be in the running for a prize. If all else fails, enjoy the awesome submissions so far ;-)

Want to Help Write the 'jQuery Mobile Cookbook'?
appendTo is leading a project to create the jQuery Mobile Cookbook to be published this year by O'Reilly and you can contribute.

From Our Sponsor

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Articles

JavaScript: Warts and Workarounds
Matt Might says that the 'key to seeing JavaScript as elegant is understanding its warts, and knowing how to avoid, work around or even exploit them.' In this post, he walks through some examples of those warts and the workarounds for them.

Client-Side MVC Frameworks Compared in Code
Paul Hammant compares 14 client-side MVC frameworks (such as Backbone, Knockout and Ember) by looking at a small but core piece of app functionality implemented in each. An interesting code-driven comparison, at least.

JavaScript, Node.js and 'for' Loops
Mikito Takada performs some experiments with loops, closures, and timeouts to show off some tricky JavaScript cases that might catch you out. An excellent writeup.

Google on The Future of JavaScript
On the Chromium blog, two Google engineers are getting excited about the ECMAScript 6 standard and the implementation of its features in the Google V8 JavaScript engine.

Find the jQuery Bug #4: Animations Gone Wild
Elijah Manor continues his series looking at a snippet of buggy code that uses jQuery before explaining the problem and implementing a solution.

Tracking JavaScript Execution During Startup

Debugging JavaScript (with Firefox's New JS Debugger)
Firefox nightlies now ship with an experimental JavaScript debugger. Panagiotis Astithas explains what it's for and how its development is coming along.

Pushing Files to the Browser Using Delivery.js, Socket.IO and Node.js

A Large-scale Study of the Use of Eval in JavaScript Applications [PDF]

Code and Libraries

Ace: Sinatra for Node
Sinatra is a popular DSL for building Web apps in Ruby and Ace, by Alex MacCaw, the author of Spine.js, brings a similar style to Node. Each request is wrapped in a Node Fiber so you can work in a synchronous manner without callbacks but get the advantages of an asynchronous server.

YSlow Released Under BSD License on GitHub
Yahoo! has released its popular Web page performance analysis tool (first developed by Steve Souders) under the BSD license and put it on GitHub to encourage community interaction in its development.

A jQuery Mobile Theme for Twitter Bootstrap
Twitter Bootstrap continues its march across the Web design and development space and Andy Matthews has brought its look to the world of jQuery Mobile for us here.

Sequence.js: A Stylish jQuery Slider Plugin
Sequence is a jQuery slider plugin that provides the functionality of a slide transition mechanism without providing any pre-defined themes, leaving you the creative control to build a unique slider using CSS3.

Restify: Node.js Module for Building REST Web Services
restify is a Node module for building REST Web services. It borrows heavily from Express API- and routing-wise.

IvanK: A 2D JavaScript Graphics Library Inspired by Flash

Flickable: Zepto Plugin for Touch Gestures on Any HTML Element
Zepto is great for handling basic gesture events, but for complex touch interactions it can be lacking. Flickable allows you to make any element touchable; useful for flicking between sections, or sliding elements around the page.

SpacePen: Client-side View Framework for CoffeeScript
SpacePen is a powerful and minimalist client-side view framework for CoffeeScript. It combines the 'view' and 'controller' into a single jQuery object, with markup expressed using an embedded DSL.

Later: Library for Describing and Querying Recurring Schedules

Last but not least..

Mixu's Node Book
A free, online Node.js book by Mikito Takada. Not completely finished but lots to enjoy so far.

Recipes with Backbone: A 125 Page (Paid) E-book