This Week in JavaScript

This is a weekly update of some interesting things relating to JavaScript, to help encourage discussion and to bring some potentially new ideas to the fore.

Here’s what we’ve seen of interest this week.

Getting started

JavaScript for Designers - an intro to JavaScript from a designers perspective

Coding techniques

Choc - lets you interactively explore code
Filtering Arrays with Array#filter
Tips for using windows in JavaScript

Libraries & Frameworks

Johnny Manziel Timeline - a nice example of using the Timeline library for an effective interface
The Future of AngularJS
How Complex are TodoMVC Implementations

Testing

BrowserSwarm - providing automatic testing across multiple web browsers for your Github project

Miscellaneous

And recently, We don’t want your CoffeeScript is a response in favour of non-compiled JavaScript.

Take a look at these recent happenings in JavaScript, let us know what you think about them, and we’ll have some more to inspire you next week.

And recently, We don’t want your CoffeeScript is a response in favour of non-compiled JavaScript.

Oh, I love a good rant.

[ot]It’s too bad the page is so wrapped up in immense steaming pile of unnecessary, annoying, in-my-face messing-with-MY-mouse fancy Javascript crap that I must best enjoy this tasty rant by CTRL-A and pasting in a terminal :confused: Lou-EEESE. The mis-placed-and-covering-up-text-I-want-to-read-because-I-accidentally-a-mouse titles/tooltips are so bad they make old Turdpress title=“Turdpress” smell like excellence.

Also wtf is this? <li ng-repeat=‘foo in bar’>??? It’s soup. A rant about Coffee would taste much better if it didn’t love soup as much as it hates coffee. At least throw a “data-” prefix on that crap. Soup+template is somehow more readable than HTML+template, but Coffee isn’t???[/ot]

It’s an AngularJS attribute - they kinda rubbed me up the wrong way when I first saw them too.

Javascript that loves invalid HTML will probably always rub me the wrong way, maybe because I write HTML…

I saw something yesterday from a developer who also dislikes Angular called React, where a virtual DOM is created and then diff’d against the existing one to achieve fast updates.

It may be feasible to create a custom Angular DTD - so that validation can then safely occur - but other solutions that I’ve seen that result in better validation support is to use the data- prefix or to use class names instead.

This is a great initiative, Paul. I’m gradually working my way through the links.

Titles like “JavaScript for Designers” are very attractive for us non-programming types, but they often disappoint. That one starts off OK, but gets into deep waters pretty soon, and will mean more to experienced programmers than noobs. That’s always the problem with quick intros like this. They can do more damage than good. There’s no substitute for a methodical, step-by-step, structured introduction to a subject.