via Ajaxian:
Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall are putting on a conference dedicated to GWT on December 3-6 in San Francisco.
Much more detail in the blog post there.
via Ajaxian:
Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall are putting on a conference dedicated to GWT on December 3-6 in San Francisco.
Much more detail in the blog post there.
Valerio posted over on the Mootools blog today about the release of Mootools 1.2 beta. I argued with him that this should be Mootools 2.0 because, once again, nearly every single method and class has been tweaked or rewritten wholesale.
Mootools 1.11 was released just over five months ago and since then the development team has been hard at work (I’ve been slacking, mostly reading code commits and giving feedback; you won’t see my name in the commit log very much on this release) and the product is something I’ve been eagerly awaiting. The list of what’s new is daunting and will take you a few minutes to read and many more to grok.
I especially look forward to Fx.Tween and Fx.Morph, the awesome test suite integration, the new and improved Hash, and the new Sortables (which I’ve already been using in a version I ported back to 1.11 for myself). But that’s not all! Call now and you get like a bazillion other new methods and shortcuts and browser fixes (oh, I forgot the new Iframe class).
SRSLY, this release is awesome. Congrats all around to the Mootools dev team, myself excluded.
A note on our stuff: The Mootorial will be a few weeks in the updating but it’ll catch up eventually. Our code base is a different story. It’s going to take a while to migrate all our stuff to 1.2 as we haven’t started yet (I learned my lesson previously; don’t start migrating for a Mootools release until the release is done or else you’re chasing a moving target, and Valerio and team are far more productive than I am). It should continue to work with the compatibility script for 1.2 installed, but we haven’t tested for that. Stay tuned as we start on this process.
The first beta for MooTools 1.2 is finally here!
After months in the making, we can confidently say that MooTools 1.2 is now feature complete. However, there are still some bugs left to squash.
Head over to MooTools download page to start playing with it right away.
The d'bug blog has a nice little post on javascript shorthand that's worth looking at if you don't know these tricks. Stuff like declaring variable defaults with the logical OR or using ternary , etc. One thing to be careful of is type coercion. Basically if you say "if (x) ..." you can get a false evaluation if x is an empty string, null, zero, or false. Check out the mootools functions $chk, $pick, and $defined for easy ways to avoid these kinds of things. You can also express conditionals using === and !== to ensure you are evaluating for the right condition.
JavaScript:
/*-----------------------------------------------
Conditional Shorthand 1
-----------------------------------------------If "a" is not defined, or is not equal to true,
then "a" is equal to "b".Longhand:
var a, b;
if ( !a ) {
a = b;
}Shorthand:
*/
var a, b;
a = a || b;/*
-----------------------------------------------
Conditional Shorthand 2
-----------------------------------------------If some condition is equal to true,
then "a" is equal to "b", or else
"a" is equal to "c".Longhand:
var a, b, c;
if ( true ) {
a = b;
} else {
a = c;
}Shorthand:
*/
var a, b, c;
a = ( true ) ? b : c;
This post over on ajaxian today led me over to d'bug, a blog by Brian & Stephanie Reindel. The Ajaxian post points to their recent post "How to Choose a Javascript Framework" which is a brief overview of what to look for in choosing. They don't endorse a particular framework but rather clue you in on what to look for.
But this article led me to "Mastering Javascript - concept and resource guide". Holy guacamole. This article is great. It's very direct and to the point and lists out the main things that you really need to grok to be a javascript bad ass:
Each item has a quick one or two sentence description followed by 3-5 links to deeper resources on each topic. Then, after all this, there's sections of links to JS articles, tutorials, and publications, Javascript tools, and finally frameworks.
This is going on my list of links for developers getting start with javascript and even if you think you have these bases covered its worth bookmarking it. Terrific stuff!
I use Eclipse at home (I run Ubuntu), but I can't say that this plugin excites me terribly. I use the debugging in firebug for a lot of different things (with our own debugging wrapper: dbug.js) and I don't know that I want all that stuff diverted into my editor... Still, it's cool and I'll probably install it just to see if it's more useful than firebug on its own. I don't really get all the mileage out of Eclipse that I could, so maybe this is just another instance of me not getting it entirely. To you Eclipse users out there, what do you think?
Note: the comments on ajaxian imply that this plugin isn't quite ready for prime time as of this posting.
via ajaxian, via Dean Edwards...
John J. Barton has released a new open source framework named Fireclipse that enables nice coupling of Firefox and Eclipse for debugging purposes, working on top of Firebug.
- Fireclipse routes error messages from Firefox’s
Javascript Console to Eclipse’s console.- Fireclipse positions an Eclipse editor on the source line reported by Firefox.
- Calls to
dump()end up on the Eclipse console- Fireclipse adds an Eclipse panel to Firebug
- Extensions to Firebug include:
- debug
eval()code.- debug event handlers
- route error messages to eclipse
- executable line numbers marked
Take a peak at the page of screenshots to see it setup in Firefox and Eclipse.
( via Dean Edwards )
The CNET JS code includes references to various assets - images and a few css files and at least one flash (swf) file. I include references in the javascript so that these things "just work" when you use them.
First and foremost, our libraries are designed for us to develop with, and making that process easy is our main concern. The problem is when you want to use these scripts somewhere other than CNET (or for local development).
Well, now you can. Just download the assets here:
http://code.google.com/p/cnetjavascript/downloads/list
Then use http://cnetjavascript.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/setAssetHref.js to set the location of the assets. Voila.
via ajaxian:
John Allsopp, who authored XRAY, has a new tool for us to play with. MRI is a bookmarklet that fires up a tool allowing you to query items on the page using CSS selectors. As you put in your queries you will see the items on the page that match. You can also click on areas of the page to show some selector queries that would find that area.
I'm curious if this will actually gain traction. Certainly the introduction of the first round of web fonts helped web developers create a coherent presentation, but I'm wondering how adoption will go of these new typefaces...
via slashdot:
"Beginning with Vista, Microsoft has updated the standard Web Core Fonts that it has used since the late 1990s. 'With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft has unleashed something quite new on the Web — the "C" fonts; Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.' The article goes on to state that 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.' The article includes a PDF document offering visual comparisons of the old and new fonts (pdf)."
via ajaxian:
VentureBeat is reporting that Google has updated their popular Google Analytics service to begin tracking Ajax and Flash-based requests:
The new additions reflect a growing feeling on the web that pageviews are a less important metric than they used to be. Google Analytics is opening a feature for beta testing that tracks user engagement with elements that have become common with Web 2.0 services, including Javascript, Ajax and Flash applications, widgets and gadgets, and downloadable pages.
With many sites reliant on selling advertising based on page views, this update will allow developers to leverage Ajax, JavaScript and/or Flash without the worry of losing valuable stats data:
While small web companies will be the primary beneficiaries of the new features, the move could also prove meaningful for online advertising. Experts have suggested for some time that advertising rates should reflect elements beyond the simple standard used so far, page views.
Full article here.
About a year or so I went to see Bill Scott give this talk down at a gathering hosted by Google (he worked for Yahoo at the time though). The talk was great but I felt I was the wrong audience for it (though I found it very informative). Really, the people who needed to see it, were designers, product managers, and engineers. The talk is awesome as it goes through all the challenges to designing and building user interaction with tons of examples and patterns. On top of that, Bill was a fun speaker.
So I emailed him and asked if he'd be interested in bringing the talk to CNET and, to my astonishment, he did. Maybe 75 of our staff crowded into our largest conference room and watched his presentation. Afterwards I got a lot of thoughtful comments and questions; he had a real impact.
There were, however a lot of people who didn't get to see this lecture and I'm glad to see that Yahoo got footage of him giving it and have posted it for anyone who missed it. It's great stuff.
