javascript - 4.11.2009 - 23.12.2010

Oni Labs: Apollo. Interesting JavaScript runtime for browsers that translates StratifiedJS to JavaScript and thus allows asynchronous code to be written largely as one would write synchronous code. This can be very practical, especially with Ajax, because the actual algorithm is no longer buried in the many callbacks.

Jquery Snowfall Plugin 1.4 | Somethinghitme. I think a snowman is kissing me. And those who don't want to hack themselves can also use the Wordpress Snow Storm plugin.

Mrdoob/three.js - GitHub. 3D Engine in JavaScript. Actually, I don't have a real application for this at the moment, but it could be quite practical for visualizations. And well, it's just cool, that alone justifies a blog post.

Namespacing in JavaScript. Everything you always wanted to know about it but were afraid to ask. Or also: why syntactic support for namespaces is overrated and plain old objects are sufficient.

Chromium Blog: A New Crankshaft for V8. And this makes JavaScript even faster. V8 is also the basis for Node.js, so this performance improvement will likely soon be available for the server as well.

chrisdickinson's wilson. One before lunch, as the framework is heavily inspired by Django, and since I'm a Django fan, it's definitely worth its own link.

Modules - node. Many modules for Node.js, more than I can quickly glance through (or want to), so for now just bookmarked for future perusal.

persistence.js: An Asynchronous Javascript ORM for HTML5/Gears. Since you always want to save data at some point, here's a link to a client-side ORM library for JavaScript. It looks quite good and could perhaps also be used for the server side. (I found another link for this that explicitly supports Node.js with MySQL).

Express - node web framework. Great, if you want to quickly build small web services with Node.js. I think it fits well with Node.js installations and jQuery on the client side. At the moment, JavaScript is pushing into many niches where Python used to be at home. Not least because JavaScript is actually not such a bad language after all.

Socket.IO is a small JavaScript library that supports socket communication from the browser and can use various techniques, automatically selecting the best available one. This makes it work across different browsers and browser generations.

FrontPage - Conkeror. Well blogged as a curiosity and because such projects simply fascinate me - a browser in JavaScript with an architecture inspired by Emacs (only JavaScript instead of ELisp).

Higher Order Javascript provides many ideas about JavaScript programming (and CoffeeScript) and how to use functional programming sensibly in JavaScript. After all, JavaScript is a powerful language with interesting abstractions that you can certainly use.

Backbone.js is an interesting project that provides a real backbone structure for more complex JavaScript projects. It implements the Model/View/Controller structure for JavaScript and provides a number of Collection classes with corresponding APIs. What it does not provide is a thick stack of UI stuff or the 1001st implementation of DOM navigation or similar - it should therefore work well with things like jQuery, as it actually only provides the basic structure on which one can build when one no longer wants to store everything in the DOM. However, there are already some overlaps, for example with events - these are also provided by jQuery, but here they are not bound to DOM nodes, but to arbitrary objects.

Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library - makes a good impression, for the various format parsing and calendar-related stuff.

How I build-in Tumblr in my Drupal install is already very close to what I want to do with Tumblr on my homepage. Now I just need to write a minimal widget and stuff the code in there and instead of the regular posts, only go to the photos. And I'll have Tumblr photos on the homepage again.

Update: those who look to the right can see the Tumblr photos again. So on the homepage. It works quite well and doesn't take up any more time. Someday I'll put together the plugin that I built there, at the moment it's still a bit raw.

hyphenator I could take a look at, because then the hyphenation simply runs with JavaScript in the browser. It's only interesting for the websites themselves anyway, feed readers have to render themselves.

Update: yeah, looks good. Now I can look at my homepage again without getting pimples, and the integration was very simple with their custom package builder - go through a few checkboxes, build an optimized download version of the library and include it in the head of the blog. As a class, I simply used entry-content, which means that all posts (and only those) are provided with hyphenation. And since it's client-side, it doesn't affect the feed or any other internal paths.

Processing.js v1.0 Released and it is still a really nice toy. Now it is almost on par with the big Processing in terms of features.

JQTreeTable does not use DataTables, but it is still quite interesting as it provides a Finder-like table representation for hierarchical data.

'Space Quest' Lands on the iPad — Courtesy of Safari | Touch Arcade - eat shit, Adobe. Who still wants Flash?.

jQuery lightBox plugin is very nice. It doesn't use Prototype or Scriptaculous, but simply jQuery - which is very helpful if a site already uses jQuery. And with the jQuery LightBox Plugin for Wordpress you can easily use it for displaying images in your own blog.

don’t look » columnManager - interesting jQuery plugin that enables efficient column show/hide for tables. If this could be combined with the DataTable plugin, it would be a very practical thing.

John Resig - Simple JavaScript Inheritance - a very nice pattern to simulate class-based inheritance with JavaScript (for the situations where this structure makes more sense than the normal prototype system of JavaScript).

jQuery column cell selector - bramstein.com - another jQuery plugin, this one provides a practical pseudo-selector for columns in a table to then make changes with JavaScript.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - had I already had that? Doesn't matter. jqTouch for creating iPhone web applications. Since I'm playing around with that at work right now, I'll just blog about it.

PhoneGap - if the site is up, there should be an application to convert a web application into a native application (with extended access to native features of the iPhone or other devices). Note for later.

emscripten - Compile LLVM bytecode to JavaScript, with loop detection etc. It's even usable to compile non-trivial C/C++ code to JavaScript. The author sees, for example, a purpose in porting existing game code to the JavaScript world, so it's quite serious. No indication whether you can boot a Linux kernel on a website with it ...

PJS4iPad - Project Hosting on Google Code - this is a really cool project: processing.js in a variant for the iPad, which uses HTML5 local storage to save programs locally, so that you can work offline with your own program. Interesting, for example, to doodle a bit while on the go (write small programs that have interesting visual effects). And because it's all a web app, the AppStore restriction does not apply.

Check out TIDE 2.0 beta - a JavaScript IDE that runs entirely in the browser.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - for those who don't want to deal with the AppStore and are satisfied with a web app, here's a book about it. Under CC license.

jquery-aop - Project Hosting on Google Code - AOP provides (among other things) easier programmed debugging and is very practical when you want to modify frameworks afterwards, but don't want wild monkey-patching. Since jQuery is my preferred JavaScript tool, I should take a closer look at this.

AdBlock for Safari - with Safari 5 you can now block ads. In this case, a Chrome extension has been ported to Safari - apparently they are quite similar (both are based on JS + HTML5 as technology).

Marak's JSLINQ at master - GitHub - a nice small JavaScript library that offers a query language for JSON data. It is oriented towards Microsoft's LINQ, but currently only has simple queries implemented. Nevertheless, it might be quite interesting to make JavaScript code more flexible and readable when working with larger amounts of JSON data.

jcotton - Build animations and graphics with JavaScript and Canvas. Looks quite interesting.

Perfection kills » What’s wrong with extending the DOM - because I keep discussing with colleagues why JQuery is better than Prototype: Prototype heavily uses the extension of prototypes, while JQuery hangs almost everything on its own JQuery object and is therefore much more cooperative in interaction with other JavaScript.

YourHead Software - I'm still considering whether to get their plugins for RapidWeaver. I managed to get RapidWeaver quite cheaply from the last MacHeist and the first experiments are really nice. And all the YourHead plugins are based on JavaScript instead of Flash, which could be good for static websites. Additionally, their internal data format is simply folders full of XML files, so you could also do something with tools.

dajaxproject.com - easy to use ajax library for django - maybe I should take a look at that, the current project might use quite a bit of Ajax and if you can reduce the amount of JavaScript that would be quite desirable.

Persistence.js: An Asynchronous Javascript ORM for HTML5/Gears « I am Zef - very interesting, an Object-Relational-Mapper in JavaScript that maps objects to HTML5 databases. This could be very interesting for offline iPhone web applications, because raw database programming (raw database, not naked programmer) is not always fun.

michaelv.org - looks like Windows 3.1 and has a series of classic Windows programs. But everything is tinkered in JavaScript. Yes, there is a DOS prompt. And a web browser. And all sorts of other things. Just click around.

Closure Compiler - actually more of a JavaScript optimizer than a compiler - it removes unnecessary parts, compacts the code, cleans up some slow things and replaces them with more efficient variants and also provides some static tests on the JavaScript code. Once blogged about for company projects.

How to create offline webapps on the iPhone - terrible page layout, but interesting documentation on how to build web applications for the iPhone that work offline thanks to the HTML5 Application Cache. After I thought for a moment about whether I should buy such a TI watch, and got annoyed that it doesn't exist as a pocket watch version, I was able to think clearly again and remembered my iPhone ... (sometimes the obvious is too obvious)

Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript - interesting article about which class and inheritance strategy to prefer in JavaScript. Mainly interesting for JavaScript framework hackers, as for the others, a technique will usually have been chosen by the frameworks.

jQuery 1.4 Released – The 14 Days of jQuery - new version of jQuery is out, many changes.

HeyChinaski.com » Blog Archive » HeyGraph Javascript and canvas graphing tool - A graphics library that automatically aligns and displays graphs. Could be interesting for one or the other project.

qb.js: An implementation of QBASIC in Javascript (part 1) - Steve Hanov's Programming Blog - that's what it says. Someone damn well has too much time.

The Render Engine - Javascript Game Engine - since JavaScript now delivers serious performance with modern browsers like Safari 4 and Chrome (and betas of Firefox), you can do crazy things like writing rendering engines for games in JavaScript.

JavaScript web workers: use visitors to your website to do background data processing for you. : programming - crazy idea: set up JavaScript workers for distributed computing on websites. Every visitor participates in the calculation of some data. Of course, unless they use something like NoScript or PithHelmet and filter out the stuff.

Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript - sounds like the great library at Google was written by the intern ...

:: Clojure and Markdown (and Javascript and Java and...) - interesting post, because here the advantage of mixed languages on the JVM is fully utilized. Instead of writing a Markdown parser for Clojure, one in JavaScript is simply used via Rhino (JS in Java). Which also ensures that both the web client and the blog server can use the same implementation of Markdown.

iWebKit - Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp - yet another iPhone web framework.

JQTouch — jQuery plugin for mobile web development - for future use, iUI is a bit rough and native applications demand the toll of 79 euros per year for the Developer program. For the few things I do, web applications are probably often sufficient.