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JavaScript Weekly
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Issue 1
November 12, 2010
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| Welcome to the inaugural issue of JavaScript Weekly - thanks for signing up! I've had great fun with Ruby Weekly and wanted to branch out to a more recent programming interest of mine - JavaScript! |
If there are things you want (or don't want) to see in JavaScript Weekly or if you just have suggestions, e-mail me at peter@javascriptweekly.com. With that, onwards.. |
This week's top news
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jQuery Mobile Alpha 2 Released —
jQuery Mobile is a touch-optimized framework (iOS and Android are currently best supported) that uses jQuery and jQuery UI for its foundation. Today, John Resig has announced a second alpha release and suggests a final 1.0 release will occur in January 2011.
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jQuery 1.4.4 Released —
jQuery 1.4.4 has been released and focuses on basic tweaks and bugfixes. The only new feature is a new Effects function called fadeToggle() that brings built-in toggling to fading effects. jQuery 1.5 is now the team's focus with an early 2011 release in the works.
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Infrastructure Company Joyent Invests in Node.js —
node.js founder Ryan Dahl reports that he has made an 'agreement with Joyent that officially puts Node under their roof' with the company sponsoring his work on the popular JavaScript framework.
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New Firefox 4 Beta Boasts Crazy JavaScript Performance —
Mozilla has rolled out a new Firefox 4 beta release with the biggest improvements coming in JavaScript and graphics performance. Firefox 4's JavaScript engine now clocks in at between 3-5 times faster than 3.6.12 on various JavaScript benchmarks. Also, WebGL (think Canvas but 3D) support is now enabled by default.
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Announcing a Node.js Book Project —
Yahoo! developer Tom Hughes-Croucher has announced a preview release of his upcoming book, Up and Running With Node.js. It's still early days with only about 25 pages shared but it shows promise.
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Introducing the new YUI Test —
Yahoo has announced a new YUI Test project with a goal to create a complete JavaScript testing solution that encompasses all parts of the testing process. It even includes a Selenium driver.
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Rebecca Murphey Offering jQuery Fundamentals Course —
jQuery guru Rebecca Murphey has teamed up with CodeLesson to offer a jQuery Fundamental course, starting in January 2011. It costs $395 but you get four weeks of jQuery tuition and Rebecca will be on hand throughout.
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This week's top articles
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Building a Simple Node.js Web Service [Video] —
Keir Whitaker presents a 10 minute video on building a simple Web service (to perform operations on numbers) with Node.js. Compellingly short, and he says "huge dump" half way through too.
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Organizing a jQuery Application —
Justin Meyer presents a walkthrough of using JavaScriptMVC to organize a jQuery-based JavaScript app, based around the separation of concerns.
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Roll your own PubSub with DNode —
James Halliday demonstrates how to use the DNode remote method invocation library to build a publish/subscribe messaging service
with JavaScript and Node.js.
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37signals' Chalk Dissected —
Sami Samhuri tears apart 37signals' purely Web based "Chalk" drawing app and looks at how it works. A good teardown of a well designed but small JavaScript and HTML5 project.
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A JavaScript Starfield on Canvas —
Charles Leifer presents a quick demo of a "starfield" effect (think the intro to Star Trek) built using JavaScript and Canvas. The code is shown inline and provides a short, well structured example of producing a basic Canvas-based effect.
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Interesting new libraries and code
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jsii - Full Text Search in 1000 Lines of JavaScript —
jsii provides an in-memory inverted index within approx 1000 lines of JavaScript. Some more lines are necessary to set up a server via node.js, so that the index is queryable via http and returns Solr-compatible JSON or XML.
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backbone-couchdb: Give your CouchDB app some Backbone —
backbone-couchdb is a Backbone.js connector that overrides the default sync-behavior of Backbone and connects your app to your CouchDB database. The result? You don't have to write any server-side if you don't want to.
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Dynamically generated MIDI in JavaScript —
Sergi Mansilla is working on a JavaScript library to let you produce MIDI files that you can play directly in the browser. It's very new and support is patchy but an interesting project nonetheless.
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DNode - Asynchronous Remote Method Invocation —
DNode is a node.js library for asynchronous, bidirectional remote method invocation across the network. Transports for network sockets and WebSocket-style socket.io connections are available. Think Ruby's DRb but for JavaScript (and on steroids).
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Snippet - A JQuery Syntax Highlighter —
Snippet is a jQuery syntax highlighting plugin built on top of the SHJS script. Snippet provides a quick and easy way of highlighting source code passages (in languages like C, CSS, HTML, Ruby, XML, SQL, Python and more) in HTML documents.
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Silly link o'the week
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Enterprise JavaScript —
Enterprise JavaScript provides a barrage of proven high performance, enterprise-level and scalable JavaScript tips and best practices. Or not.
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| P.S. I won't normally do this but if you found this e-mail interesting, could you forward it on to other developers or encourage them to subscribe? Thanks! |
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