Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Category: Library, Performance
I didn’t want the TaskSpeed library task test suite to be lost in the Dojo 1.3 announcement. Alex called it out: Pete Higgins has been working on a new set of benchmarks with the help of other toolkit vendors (to ensure fairness) called “TaskSpeed“. Dojo 1.3 wins by a wide margin. Across all the reported Read the rest…
Category: Dojo
We have been using Dojo 1.3 release candidates for awhile on Bespin, and today the Dojo team released Dojo 1.3 just in time for Internet Explorer 8.1 (really? some people believed that? I know that it isn’t quite April Fools……). There are some nice usable APIs added to base such as: < View plain text Read the rest…
Category: JavaScript
Dean Edwards has a subtle piece on callbacks vs. events where he calls out the issue of libraries that support custom events dying out when one custom event dies. First, Dean sets the stage: < View plain text > javascript document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { console.log("Init: 1"); DOES_NOT_EXIST++; // this will throw an error }, Read the rest…
Anne van Kesteren has posted on the specs that are moving out of the large HTML5 mega spec, and into their own little ditties: The current state of things is that the following editor drafts are separated out from HTML5: Server-Sent Events: Defines the EventSource API. Web Storage: Defines the database, session, and persistent storage Read the rest…
We mentioned that a new excanvas was released to keep up support with IE 8. Well, Louis-Rémi Babe has detailed his travails finding out what what changed in IE 8 VML land: Although the VML specification hasn’t undergone any improvements or modifications since its publication back in 1998, Microsft development team felt like considerably changing Read the rest…
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Category: Showcase
Just last week a few of us were discussing the riches that await discovery in the various computer science research paper archives and today Peter Bergström wrote in to tell us that he’s finished work on his PaperCube research paper search engine (which we mentioned when it was incomplete some time ago). Bsaed on SproutCore, Read the rest…
Category: JavaScript, Testing
Christian Johansen is tired of: mentally decoding test names like “testNewUserWithClownShoesShouldSqueak”, so I’ve written some code to improve readability for JavaScript unit tests written using JsUnitTest (from prototypejs). It’s heavily inspired by Ruby frameworks Shoulda and Context. Tests with his new framework–called jscontext–look like this: < View plain text > js new Test.Unit.Runner({ Read the rest…
Category: Browsers, CSS
, Performance
Nicole Sullivan has a very detailed post on reflow and repaints and how they affect performance (and also how to potentially avoid them). What are they again? A repaint occurs when changes are made to an elements skin that changes visibility, but do not affect its layout. Examples of this include outline, visibility, or background Read the rest…
Category: JavaScript, Library
, Prototype
Andrew has posted on Prototype 1.6.1 RC 2, a new release that “is fully compatible — and fully optimized for — Internet Explorer 8’s “super-standards” mode. In particular, Prototype now takes advantage of IE8’s support of the Selectors API and its ability to extend the prototypes of DOM elements.” New Features Full compatibility with Internet Read the rest…
Friday, March 27th, 2009
We recently posted on Atmosphere, a new framework designed to provide an abstraction layer over Comet back-ends for Java web applications. At a personal level, this comes at an interesting time as over in the Mozilla Labs we’re evaluating different Comet approaches for our upcoming collaboration release. As we looked at various options, we come Read the rest…
Category: Adobe, Opera
, Performance
, The Ajax Experience
, Video
Fresh from our hidden cache, we bring you: Ajax 2.0 with Anne van Kesteren Ajax Testing Tool Review with Ted Husted Analyzing the Ajax Application Performance with Gaurav Seth Building Your First Adobe AIR Application with Kevin Hoyt
Category: Security
Gareth Heyes has released XSS Rays, an open source library for detecting XSS holes via a bookmarklet: The code works by creating connections to the target links/paths using iframes, each iframe is assign a name which is the url to return to on successful execution (the originating url). This allows cross domain links to be Read the rest…
Category: Apple, JavaScript
Gus Mueller has announced JSTalk, an alternative to AppleScript that uses JavaScript and the JSCocoa bridge, and an Objective-J-like language alternative to hide the ugly_methods_when_needed. Here is Gus: JSTalk’s goal can described like this: JSTalk is to AppleScript, what Cocoa is to Carbon. I know, I know. It’s a lofty, crazy goal. But someone has Read the rest…
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Category: CSS, JavaScript
, Library
Remember when we thought there may be less CSS selector engines? :) Instead we have renewed performance-based competition among them. Sly is the latest selector engine created by Harald Kirschner. To use, it looks like this: < View plain text > javascript // Finds all odd rows in all tables var rows = Sly.search(‘table td:odd’); Read the rest…
If you ever go to the BBC website you will see the working clock in the top right: It thus seems appropriate that Paul Hayes of London has created an interesting experiment that shows how you can create an analogue clock using just CSS and JavaScript is only used to get the current time. The Read the rest…
Category: iPhone, JavaScript
, Library
, Mobile
David Kaneda has created jQTouch a “jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.” Features Setup jQTouch can now be initialized with one function: < View plain text > javascript $(document).jQTouch({ icon: ‘jqtouch.png’, statusBar: ‘black-translucent’ }); This function writes all Read the rest…
In Episode 25, we chat about IE 8, standards, Acid3, server side JavaScript, and more.
