Issue #76 - April 27, 2012

Articles

Yahoo!'s Doug Crockford on JavaScript
Smashing Magazine's Jacob Cook presents an interview with the esteemed Douglas Crockford, author of JavaScript: The Good Parts and developer of JSLint and JSMin.

5 Things They Told You Not to Use in JavaScript
Thomas Fuchs outlines 5 JavaScript features that are commonly advised against while explaining why they're not so bad. It caused a little controversy on Twitter and Hacker News so be prepared, but the follow up post by Kit Cambridge helps put it all in perspective.

Mixins and Constructor Functions
JavaScript lets us take properties from one object and mix them into others. There are several ways to accomplish this 'mixing' and Peter Michaux explores a few of them here.

Declaring Module Exports (for both Node.js and AMD)
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer shares a handful of patterns for defining module exports for both CommonJS and AMD modules.

requestAnimationFrame For Silky Smooth JavaScript Animation
If you've ever tried to create an animation or game loop in JavaScript by hand, you may have leaned on the setTimeout or setInterval functions. But 'requestAnimationFrame' has many advantages - learn more here.

Cursor/Caret Navigation in Web Applications
Michael Bolin explains in length the (surprising) challenges involved in merely keeping the text insertion cursor in the right place dynamically. Deep reading.

Fixing These jQuery
A smashing HTML5 presentation by Adam Sontag covering basic approaches to debugging jQuery and JavaScript code.

Extending PhoneGap with Native Plugins for Android

Using Your App's YUI Components on the Server
YUI core team member Eric Ferraiuolo has built an example app (for both desktop and mobile clients) to demonstrate using YUI on both the client and server.

From our sponsor

O'Reilly Fluent: A JavaScript and HTML5 Conference in SF Next Month
I'm co-chairing O'Reilly's new JS and HTML5 conference. Our program has (mostly) been announced with speakers like Alex MacCaw, Brendan Eich, Amy Hoy, Lea Verou, Paul Irish, Thomas Fuchs and Steve Souders sharing what they know. It's in San Francisco on May 29-31 and code 'JSWEEK20' gives a 20% discount.

Submissions are still being accepted for our Ignite event (a lightning talk format) and our Startup Showcase, so if you're doing something interest or your startup uses JavaScript, feel free to apply!

Videos and Media

11 Talk Videos from jQuery UK 2012
Back in February, there was a jQuery conference in the UK and 11 videos of talks from folks like Paul Irish, Christian Heilmann and Addy Osmani are now available. The recording quality is good so it makes for good watching.

Lostcast: Interview with the Creator of ImpactJS
A podcast interview with Dominic Szablewski, the creator of popular JavaScript and HTML5 gaming framework 'Impact.' It's 45 minutes long and of particular interest if you're into HTML5 game development.

Code and Libraries

Rucksack: jQuery Plugin to Arrange Page Elements in a Chosen Width
Rucksack is a jQuery plugin that arranges elements to fit within a given width (the visual demos are best to illustrate this).

The Amazing Magical Template Engine Chooser
Need a JavaScript library to do templating? Here are 11 for you, all filterable by answers to 7 simple questions.

Cubism.js: Time Series Visualization
Cubism.js is a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. It can be used to build realtime dashboards, pulling data from Graphite, Cube and other sources.

Lodash: A Faster Drop-in Replacement for Underscore.js?
A drop-in replacement for Underscore.js that claims to deliver an 'up to 8x performance improvement' along with some extra features. I haven't tested it myself yet but it has good provenance.

dgrid: Full Featured Data Grids
Bills itself as a 'next-generation grid component that takes full advantage of modern browsers and object stores.' The examples are appealing and it's a fine example of a good project site.

A Readable Conway's Game of Life (in CoffeeScript)

A Raycasted ASCII Checkerboard in 128 Bytes
An impressive ASCII-based demo of a moving checkerboard in a mere 128 bytes (including both the HTML and JavaScript!)

crud-bones: Skeleton Code for a MySQL or Mongo + Node.js Project
A boilerplate project for kicking off your own simple MySQL or Mongo-powered Node.JS project. It includes Cluster, Express, EJS, logging, and access to MySQL, Mongo and Redis, as well as instructions on how to deploy to Heroku.

cdir: Interactive console.dir() For The Terminal
cdir presents an interactive representation of an object similar to that of console.dir() in WebKit, except in the terminal. Looks nice!

Punch: A Fun and Easy Way to Generate Modern Websites
Punch is a simple tool to generate Web sites from Mustache templates and content stored in JSON and Markdown format. It's built in Node.js and designed to work on your local filesystem.

Tree: A New JS Unit Testing Framework for the Browser
A new unit testing framework aimed at the browser (though Node support is coming soon) that takes an interesting tree-based approach to displaying its output. Screenshot inside.

jQuery Endless Scroll
Fred Wu's popular plugin has had several updates in the last month. For example, it now supports infinite up-scrolling.

Machina.js: Finite State Machines
Machina.js is a JavaScript framework for building customizable finite state machines (FSMs) by Jim Cowart.

An Enhanced Javascript Bundle for Sublime Text 2

Last but not least..

Code Avengers: A New Interactive JavaScript Learning Site
The latest in a line of beginner-focused interactive JavaScript tutorials takes a more thematic approach than most. Code Avengers includes 40 interactive lessons with 5 tasks in each.