Code
The release of Node.js in 2009 ushered in discussions about the endless possibilities for sharing code between the client-side and the server side. While there are several good examples of entire libraries working very well on both ends, most of the projects that are written in Node tend to shy away from sharing the meat … Read more
JavaScript is different from other programming languages because it is asynchronous. That means that there is a possibility that several things can be happening at the same time. In other words, JavaScript doesn’t wait for one thing to execute before going to the next. If you are waiting for a timeout to fire, or a … Read more
Before I left Moontoast last month, they worked with me to open-source a HTML5 canvas jQuery charting library I created for their internal analytics tool. I wrote a blog entry for their developer blog introducing jQuery ToastChart. I thought you might be interested to see it.
I’ve recently been working on a JavaScript API that interfaces with a REST-based server-side API and handles cross-domain issues while still allowing GET, POST, PUT and DELETE methods to be fired from anywhere on the web. Due to cross-domain security issues at the browser level, making POST, PUT and DELETE requests can be a lot … Read more
As a JavaScript developer, I tend to spend a lot of time getting and setting data using a server-side API. Over the past few years, I’ve encountered all sorts of APIs and I’ve formed some opinions on what makes a good API for JavaScript interaction. Here are some of my thoughts. Make the API use … Read more
Most of us can agree that spawning popups with JavaScript is usually a user experience FAIL. We’ve all been to websites that opened several popup ads. That is always something to avoid. Malicious and ad-happy sites have made it necessary for browser plugins and some browsers to block JavaScript popups altogether. But there are some … Read more
This is something that I have been trying to make up my mind on over the past year and a half at least. The question? Do JavaScript libraries need an abstraction layer? Just to clear the air a little before we jump into the discussion, if you are making a small website, this doesn’t apply. … Read more
I tend to fall in with Coldfusion programmers from time to time and while I actually really like the language and the community, the one thing that can make working with Coldfusion and JavaScript harder is how the language returns JSON. Typical JSON looks something like this: But Coldfusion encodes structs to look more like … Read more
I’ve recently been thinking about what it would mean to emulate the MVC best practice of skinny controllers that started in the confines of server-side development within the much more glamorous language and beautiful JavaScript. For those of you who haven’t read some of my previous posts, I am a huge advocate of using Model … Read more
A few weeks ago, I started using SASS. What is SASS? It’s an acrostic that stands for “Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets.” SASS is run from the command line and essentially lets you write stylesheets with things like variables, nesting and mixins (which are pretty much the equivalent of the functions in a real programming language). … Read more