The idea of running JavaScript on the server has been around for a while now (think Jaxer back in 2008), but it recently got a big boost with the featuring of Node.js at JSConf in November 2009. Node.js found immediate fame by demonstrating blinding performance as a web server, and by building on the hotly hyped V8 JavaScript engine Google bundled [...]
November 4, 2009 – 5:29 pm
I’d like to say I always write tests before I write any JavaScript code… Those times when I do write tests, I use the QUnit framework, which is used to test jQuery, so pretty well-tested itself. I’ve recently been putting together an Adobe AIR application using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (aka Web Standards), which is [...]
August 6, 2009 – 10:49 pm
I recorded this at Islington Hackspace tonight, figured it would be cool to share visually rather than have a big blag-rant, (see my last post for one of those). It ought to be self-explanatory. I’m thinking about wrapping this up in an iPhone app so I can pay people for free. Rather than use PayPal [...]
I’ve been wingeing quite a lot recently about AppJet’s demise and the shoddy state of potential replacements, and got quite a nice response from Jim Pick at Joyent. I decided today to have a play with their new Smart Platform and had a go at porting one of my AppJet applications over to Smart. Here’s [...]
I’ve been working during the last fortnight on the “Streams” project, which LShift, an IT consultancy in Shoreditch, are building in conjunction with the BBC. My part in this project has been to prototype the interface that a non-technical person would use to edit and create Streams, which are box-and-wire visual workflows similar to those [...]
November 10, 2008 – 4:08 pm
It’s not unusual to want to write a cross-browser logging function akin to Firebug’s console.log(). The approach that you would expect to work could quite plausibly be this: function log() { if(console) { console.log.apply(this,arguments); } } We invoke the function with apply here so that implementations that can take multiple arguments receive them. However, this [...]
I heard about SproutCore recently, from an enthusiastic client-side web developer. I hadn’t heard about it, which is not entirely unsurprising as it turns out – SproutCore came out of hiding as something of a surprise at the recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, as the power behind the slick interfaces for Apple’s new suite of [...]
September 17, 2007 – 5:24 pm
I’ve been racking my brains all afternoon trying to find a workable solution to the problem of not being able to make remote HTTP calls using javascript. This is an issue for me because so much of my work takes place inside a TiddlyWiki which, when viewed locally (from a file:// url) is a perfect [...]
September 5, 2007 – 3:56 pm
I frequently find myself wanting to refer to the contents of an element on a web page, having got hold of that element in the DOM. However, I equally frequently forget how to access this content. The confusion arises because there are various ways to get hold of the content of an element: nodeValue, value, [...]
Edit: I’ve updated the list of editors below after some good leads in the comments. So… I’ve been pottering around the web looking for a decent development environment to free me from the shackles of Notepad, which I’ve been using without fail since about 1999. Yes, it’s tragic. I was looking for a tool to [...]
