Posts tagged with: "javascript"

Most developers know that it makes a lot of sense to develop software that you can "write once and run anywhere." It's more economical, easier to implement cross-platform, and generally leads to fewer headaches. Back when the most important and/or dominant platform was the Desktop, QT and Java made it easy to develop software that could be run anywhere. But enter the Smartphone Era stage-left, and you've got a problem - those solutions are not available on iPhones, iPads, etc.

This has led to a lot of buzz around HTML5-based development for mobile apps (PhoneGap, for example is a popular platform for building applications with HTML5). Often these platforms do not support native UI components, but people seem to care less about standard UI nowadays; authoring UI with HTML5 gives people more freedom on look and feel. Traditionally javascript is very restricted for security reason (no local file/socket access etc), but the restriction can be lifted via browser extension.

So, great - we can use HTML5 to write platform-independent software for smart phones. But, we can also use similar technology to write desktop applications with HTML5 - even better!

Last Friday I decided to celebrate _whyday by taking a departure from my normal open source path and writing some Javascript (well, technically Coffeescript). So today we're announcing Sketch.js, a simple jQuery library to enable HTML5 Canvas "sketchpads" for any web application.

I tell myself that I write JS every day, but I don’t. I write jQuery. Don’t get me wrong, it gets the job done. But it never feels right. Now, jQuery and its DOM-centric approach (at least in common usage) aren’t all to blame. Its just as much my fault in that beyond the library, I know very little about the language. I intend to do something about it. I have a plan and I’m going to share it with you. First, here are my goals:

If you've upgraded to the recently released jQuery 1.5, you may have heard about the fancy new AJAX facilities that allow you to define things in novel ways.

The Node Knockout is this weekend **right now** and I've been trying to teach myself Node and get ready in a variety of ways. One of the most important (and least clear) aspects of preparation was figuring out how to properly vendor the latest Node libraries for use in Heroku. I've got NPM up and running locally, but as of its latest release it has no built-in support for vendoring. Here's how I managed.