Hello and welcome to This Week in JavaScript—a lovingly curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JS. The complete list is tagged jsweekly. (Don’t forget to check out our weekly .Net roundup too!)
###Aurelia.io
Let’s kick off this week with a look at Aurelia—a forward thinking (written with ES6 and ES7), powerful JavaScript framework. Over on SitePoint Brad Barrow looked at using Aurelia to create a reddit client, then Vildan Softic looked at how to extend HTML the Aurelia way. Elsewhere Rob Eisenberg (the creator of Aurelia) hosted a live web cast focussing on what Aurelia is and how you can use it in your projects. He also dropped in on the Web Platform podcast to discuss the ‘spiritual successor’ to his Durandal project. Finally, this is a high-level view of the Aurelia framework by one dev who went looking for Angular 2—but ended up finding something else. I know we’ve mentioned framework fatigue in the past, but Aurelia.io is one to keep an eye on …
##jquery
Last week Paul featured the original jQuery source code, annotated by John Resig. Well, hot on the tail of that we now have eleven things you might not know about jQuery. Meanwhile Lea Verou considers jQuery to be harmful and is proposing a site that lists vanilla JS alternatives to jQuery plugins. Not convinced? In that case here are 26 modern jQuery plugins to make your website better and a great jQuery cheatsheet/API reference I discovered recently.
##learning
Addy Osmani recently outlined how to automatically apply style guide rules to your JS code using JSCS and SublimeText3 (this is great if you are working on a team). Here’s a brief guide to concatenation in JavaScript. Brain bleeding JavaScript obfuscation is the subject of this article, where the author attempts to reverse engineer code involved in a banking trojan. This is a JavaScript app that (based on a number of preset values) will calculate the CSS rules to center any element on a page. Here are a bunch of tips for unit testing services, controllers and providers in AngularJS. And finally, BooJS allows you to execute JavaScript in the command line as if you were in a browser. Pretty nifty!
###Looking forward
Here’s a great piece on ES6 arrow functions, syntax and lexical scoping. Here’s a look at new number and math features in ES6. Not strictly a JS link, but if maths is your thing, check out this maths problem from Singapore which recently went viral. On SitePoint Christian Johansen (author of Sinon.JS) looked at tight coupling of JS code to the DOM and what we can do to avoid it. Whilst elsewhere we learned that npm wants to push JavaScript developers to make Lego-Like web apps (this is part of their new initiative is called Private Modules) and Firefox Developer Edition 39 was released, bringing with it drag elements, console history, and more.
I hope you’ve enjoyed working through these links. Before I leave you, might I remind you to check out SitePoint’s official JavaScript newsletter which you can subscribe to here: http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/
Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue or if there is anything you would like to see featured.Paul and Pullo.