education
NodeJS may still be young, but there are already several MVC frameworks popping up to run exclusively on Node. My favorite is CompoundJS. Compound was written to look like to Ruby on Rails. In fact, Compound’s original name was “Railway on Express.” As the defunct name implies, Compound runs on top of the ExpressJS framework. Some of … Read more
JQuery comes loaded with various utility methods that make manipulating elements and data easier. One really useful method is jQuery.map(). Map is used to manipulate array values. Behind the scenes, jQuery.map loops over any array that you feed it and gives you a callback function to modify it. In the old days before the dawn … Read more
BackboneJS is a great framework for building large scalable JavaScript applications. One of the best things about Backbone is that the community has built countless amazing plugins that extend the Backbone namespace. I’ve compiled a list with just a few of my very favorite Backbone plugins. Backbone Forms This is a nifty plugin that generates … Read more
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
I’ve been working on several projects in the past year or so that have required me to write some jQuery plugins and custom JavaScript widgets and I feel like several of them could definitely be useful for other developers. I’ve set a goal this year to release at least two projects to the community, but … Read more
A few days ago I realized that I read a lot of books and articles about JavaScript and web development and that this would be a good place to share my thoughts about them both for my own reference and maybe even for helping other people out. In the interest of that revelation, I present … 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