Algorithms book
September 6th, 2006
Free Algorithms textbook - because you never know when you’ll need a different algorithm.
Archive
Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category
The JavaScript Library World Cup
June 27th, 2006
The JavaScript Library World Cup: Dan Webb writes an excellent article providing a high-level view of 4 different JavaScript libraries (Dojo, Prototype/Scriptaculous, MochiKit and Yahoo! UI).
iBox javascript
June 21st, 2006
iBox is like Lightbox but can handle separate pages, inline divs and images. It’s also small (11K).
Using JavaScript Widgets with TurboGears
May 30th, 2006
I’ve just put up a new screencast showing how easy it is to use JavaScript libraries that have been packaged as TurboGears widgets: Using JavaScript with TurboGears. This screencast actually shows off a few things:
- Using a widget (obviously)
- How widgets include the necessary JavaScript
- The widget browser in the TurboGears Toolbox
- How cool setuptools/Python Eggs are (I start from not even having the widget package installed).
This shows off setuptools, because I used the Lightbox widget, which in turn requires the Scriptaculous widget. Without any additional configuration, the widgets show up in the widget browser. easy_install and go!
FireBug 0.4
May 24th, 2006
While there are folks routing around JavaScript to implement in their native languages, there are folks like Joe Hewitt turning JavaScript development (at least with Firefox) into a more pleasant experience. Firebug 0.4 debugger (breakpoints and all!)
Why are people still afraid of JavaScript?
May 19th, 2006
The recent introduction of the Google Web Toolkit, which allows you to write your JavaScript in Java put a thought back into my conciousness: why are people going so far out of their way to avoid writing JavaScript today?
To their credit, the Google Web Toolkit provides some distinct reasons to choose it over hand-coded JavaScript: static typign (for those who like that kind of thing) and the ability to use the IDE you know and love.
And I’m certainly not opposed to encapsulating JavaScript into features that are native to your server-side toolkit’s language. Reducing the amount of code you need to write is always a good thing. (And TurboGears widgets do that very thing).
The part that I have trouble grokking is the various projects that implement Dynamic Language X (say Python or Ruby) to JavaScript conversions. Yes, JavaScript is prototype-based rather than class-based. But, otherwise it’s not a big leap to go from Python or Ruby to a language like JavaScript. Adding a layer that converts Python to JavaScript seems to me that it just introduces another place to fail, and a somewhat difficult one to troubleshoot at that since the execution environment is quite different from the environment in which you’re writing your code. If you run into problems with that conversion, you’ve got to learn the JavaScript and the JavaScript debugging tools and then also figure out what’s wrong with the translation!
For a dynamic language user, I just don’t see the benefit as being with the risk at this point.
You should certainly use a JavaScript library of some sort to ease common programming tasks. JavaScript-the-language is easy enough to follow, but there are certainly inconveniences in the built-in library and pitfalls in browser compatibility which any one of a number of great toolkits will help you deal with.
This is not a rant, by the way. I’m genuinely curious to hear why people who are already using a dynamic language feel that it’s a big leap to go to JavaScript. Or, if you don’t feel it’s a big leap, what other reasons are there to use Language Foo -> JavaScript translators.
Ajaxian » Javascript Associative Arrays considered harmful
May 19th, 2006
In talking about Javascript Associative Arrays considered harmful, Ajaxian mentions that the Prototype library no longer extends Object.prototype as of 1.5. Welcome to the world of compatible JavaScript! (They do extend Array.prototype, but that cause far fewer headaches, if any.)
Comparison of Dojo and Prototype
May 11th, 2006
A very on target comparison of Dojo and Prototype (javascript toolkits). As I said in the comments there, MochiKit hits the same kind of easy-to-use sweet spot that Prototype does, but it also plays nicely with Dojo. And has great docs.
dojo.storage: offline storage for your Ajax data
May 1st, 2006
This is some most excellent stuff: Brad Neuberg: Offline Access and Permanent, Client-Side Storage, Thanks to Dojo.Storage. Here’s a packaged up way to store megabytes (if you need to) permanently on the user’s computer, as long as they’re using one of the browsers used by 95%+ of the population. This is not the kind of capability that everyone needs, but when it’s right for your app you didn’t really have a way until now.
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