This Week in JavaScript - 6 January 2014

JavaScript
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Your weekly update of interesting happenings in the world of JavaScript - feel free to discuss, and help to bring some new ideas to light.

I hope that you enjoyed the new year and the holiday break. A lot has been happening this week and we have even more to look forward to in the forth coming year, for example: five technologies to look forward to in 2014

Libraries

A lot of updates have occurred to libraries recently. From minor to extreme, the following are the more interesting ones:

fluidbox A lightbox with fluid transitions
wordcount Calculate file newlines, word, and byte counts on client side using HTML5 File API
math An extensive and powerful math library
shifty A flexible tweening engine
amMap Create interactive animated maps
planetary - rotating globes that are interactive and customisable
ocr Optical Character Recognition in JS
ogv An OGG Theora and Vorbis video decoder in JavaScript
epub A JavaScript library for rendering ePub documents in the browser, across many devices

Learning More

Everything you wanted to know about JavaScript scope, giving a full run-down of different situations with code examples
Managing the Asynchronous Nature of Node.js, removing deeply nested callbacks
An Overview of JavaScript Promises, still experimental, but is a standard to look forward to in the future
An Introduction to the getUserMedia API, learning by playing with your webcam and mic

Best Practices?

Are these really best practices? Be careful of what you take for granted, just because something is said to be a best practice.

45 Useful JavaScript Tips, Tricks and Best Practices, but are all of them worthy? [thanks felgall]
Better JavaScript selectors, a controversial topic. There may be a lot of push-back on this one
Pete Hunt: React - Rethinking Best Practices (video), an intro to React, how it helps to speed things up, and provide simpler maintenance

Testing

Jasmine celebrates its 5th birthday. with a new release, and Blanket for checking your code coverage has been getting quite a lot of press lately. Articles have been coming out about integrating Mocha with Blanket.

Jasmine is 5 and 2.0

blanket.js Seamless javascript code coverage
Get your Frontend JavaScript Code Covered
Blanket + Mocha with RequireJS (and Grunt) - code coverage setup guide

Scaling Up

handlebars.js Handlebars provides the power necessary to let you build semantic templates effectively with no frustration
Handlebars.js ties Ghost, Ember and Assemble together
Single-Page Applications with Thorax.js
JavaScript performance analysis: Keeping the big picture

Cool Stuff
Zero to Nyancat in 30 Seconds Flat!
Orbit Viewer is a Chrome Experiment by Kevin Gill that helps visualise the orbits of comets and satellites

Are you feeling like :fire: keeping up with all of these updates? One thing’s for sure, it’s certainly an interesting time to be involved.

Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue, and happy reading! - Paul & [URL=“http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/private.php?do=newpm&u=184222”]Pullo

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With the 45 Useful JavaScript Tips, Tricks and Best Practices number 12 does not randomly shuffle the entries. Using .05 gives a bias toward leaving the entries in their original order. Using a value somewhere between 0.7 and 0.8 gives a more random result but will still be slightly biased. To get a proper shuffle you can’t use sort.

With 14 the built in concat() method has always been available and can join two arrays into one with far less code than shown. Several of the others can also be done in a lot less code by using one of the new methods introduced into JavaScript way back in 2011 (well you might need a polyfill for IE8 but less code in modern browsers).

The page appears rather old since several of the things it advises against using are no longer able to be used if you specify “use strict” so as to use the latest version of JavaScript - “with” no longer exists, all variables must be declared with “var” or the script will not run

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You’re dead right there. That article seems to be more of a blog post that has taken ideas from different sources. It deserves some contemplation, to the point where I’m going to update the top post.