Ryan Tomayko

Heroku Ships Experimental Node.js Support —

Boom. It looks like long running connections aren’t completely baked yet but this is really promising.

Introducing Jake: A Build Tool for JavaScript —

Looks great. Really glad to see file tasks, too. Code is here. I’m dying for a real JavaScript project so I can start playing with all the great looking stuff these guys are putting out.

Higher Order Mustache —

Mustache is my favorite template language by far. By far. This is a great example of why. It solves every problem simply and elegantly, or it doesn’t solve it all. Here’s the syntax in its entirety. In his post, Chris talks about how adding very simple lambda support solved the cache block problem. It’s just as suitable as solution for embedding Markdown in templates.

Sweet Justice —

New JavaScript based text justification library looks promising. The default HTML/CSS text justification built into every browser has always sucked, due mostly to lack of word hyphenation.

One of the places I’d really like to have good justification is in Ronn’s HTML based man pages. It uses text-align: justify currently, but I’ve been considering making it non-justified because it’s so horribly bad. Compare it to the proper justified / hyphenated text generated by groff when viewing manpages in a terminal. It’s night and day.

docco —

Okay, this is the project used to generate the previously linked CoffeeScript documentation. It’s a “quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator.” It pulls out comments, applies markdown, and then runs the code through pygments for syntax highlighting.

Beautiful.

CDN Catalog —

We should be doing more of this:

If you’re building a modern website then you’ll be needing some javascript libraries and css.

Rather than hosting these common libraries on your own server, you should Use a Content Delivery Network. Lucky for you Google, Microsoft and Yahoo host a range of popular javascript and css which you can directly link to for free. This saves your bandwidth and speeds up your website load time.

The great thing about the shared CDN approach is that the resources are cached once and reused across all sites, often without even making a validation request.

I’d seen the JavaScript libraries before but I’d never considered using this approach with CSS. The YUI CSS reset is a perfect example of where a shared CDN provides the most benefit. If every site that employed the basic CSS reset used this URL, it would effectively be baked into the browser with no overhead after the first request.

Node.js, redis, and resque —

Interesting use of node.js as a sort of HTTP reverse proxy. It uses redis based queues to communicate with backends instead of establishing a direct socket connection and doing HTTP:

This spike uses node to put messages into a (redis) queue. Ruby background workers read from the queue, process the requests, and respond on a different queue. When node receives the response from the background worker, it sends the response back to the waiting user.

I assume this adds a not insignificant amount of latency to each request but would also make possible a bunch of long-running connection features. For example, the response (or portions of the response) could be delivered from separate worker processes. This style of architecture, where the client connection isn’t tied to backend web process, looks promising. The nginx_http_push_module is another example that gives the same types of benefits.

A Hidden Cost of Javascript —

Interesting set of results from a series of JavaScript parse and load benchmarks on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera presented with pretty graphs and tables. I’m convinced browser-side JavaScript profiling and optimization—including this kind of parse+load and GC profiling—is going to occupy more and more of my time in the future.

How would you serve 100,000 simultaneous comet requests with Node? —

Simon Willison throws down a C100K problem for node.js. That’s a tough order for a single machine. To get even close, you’re going to need lots of system tuning way down below node.js.

Node.js For My Tiny Ruby Brain: Keeping Promises —

Rick documents his progress a week into node.js. Nice look at some of the basic concepts underlying the system, like async everywhere and promises.

Highcharts - Interactive JavaScript charts for your webpage —

Nice looking pure JS charting library:

I’ve been seeing more and more of these charting libs lately and they all look great.

Server-Side Javascript: Back With a Vengeance —

Nice to see Narwhal, Jack, CommonJS, and node.js getting some love on ReadWriteWeb. Javascript on the server is breaking out.

Video: Node.js by Ryan Dahl —

ry’s talk from JSConf.eu. The leading paragraph says it all:

Node.js might be the most exciting single piece of software in the current JavaScript universe. Ryan received standing ovations for his talk and he really deserved it!

Wow. JavaScript is pretty damn big universe right now.

Node.js is genuinely exciting —

I agree. I played with it for a couple days and now I can’t shut up about it. That’s basically all I talked about at RubyConf :)

User Scripts (Chromium Developer Documentation) —

Chromium runs GreaseMonkey user scripts, apparently. It also says here that “script edits are picked up [from the file system] automatically; just refresh the page to see the changes,” which is something that annoyed me with Firefox’s GM Addon — the files were buried, crazily named, and you had to use that janky addon manager bullshit to make/reload changes. What is that? A directory full of user scripts (now ~/.js on my system) is a perfectly simple setup. Combine that with right-now reloading and I might actually be able to develop these things when I need them.

Anyway, this AdSweep thing is what led me to investigate; looks pretty reliable if you can get through the GM setup.

Detecting HTML 5 Features —

Mark has published the second chapter in his upcoming book, Dive Into HTML 5. I still can’t get past the typography. It’s so pretty.

Let's make the web faster —

Big giant list of articles, essays, tutorials, and tech talks on making the web faster. This is part of a larger Google Code project that asks, “what would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine?”

Heroku Pricing —

I’ve been staring at this screen for two sleepless weeks now. Really glad to have it wrapped. James Lindenbaum (CEO/founder/bad-ass) did most of the conceptual design work. seaofclouds did the fucking amazing illustrations and took the design to completion. Pedro Belo did the HTML/JavaScript and server side stuff. Definitely one of the best teams I’ve worked on.

JSONQuery —

XPath-like syntax for expressing selection queries against JSON data structures. Interesting concept. I’ve always wondered why the basic concepts behind XPath were never borrow and applied to other types of structured data — it’s so insanely useful. I suppose jQuery popularized using CSS selectors for querying HTML but why not take the same basic concept and apply it to problem domains outside of SGML-inspired markup languages and their data models.

Javascript, it's Python with braces! —

Guyon Morée shows how JavaScript 1.7/1.8 have been moving more and more toward Python with a few side-by-side examples. List comprehensions and generators would definitely be extremely cool to have in browser land.

The Road to HTML 5: getElementsByClassName() —

Includes a brief history of native support for getElementsByClassName in Mozilla and other browsers.

Creating a Rack Middleware for Minifying Your Javascript files —

Pretty good introduction to building pieces of Rack middleware and using Rack::Builder.

AJAX should not mandate HTTP —

Huh? In a sane world, “Ajax” would have been called “HTTP” (or, more elaborately: “JavaScript gets a mostly-standard asynchronous HTTP client library”).

At first I thought this was going to be one of those articles that confuses animated JavaScript effects for Ajax but it goes on to talk about how Ajax is bad because it breaks “Save Page to File” … or something. Save Page to File?!

Managed Ajax - A New Approach to Ajax —

A horrible and misguided idea. I’ve personally never even liked the RJS/JavaScript generation stuff in Rails, and it’s actually well designed, thought out, and quite simple. “Managed Ajax” takes it to a whole new level, building from the assumption that “JavaScript is the new assembler,” and moves most types of interaction logic to the server. Reality seems to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Do yourself a favor and get real comfortable with JavaScript.

Cross Site XMLHttpRequest Design —

Oh, nice. Here’s a high-level design document that describes the new cross-site XmlHttpRequest (their calling it, “XXX”) functionality and ties the other documents floating around out there together. It seems that servers will be able to signal that certain resources are accessible from other domains using HTTP headers or (gasp!) XML processing instructions (PIs). Weird.

Bug 389508 – Implement Cross-site XMLHttpRequest —

Just landed on mozilla trunk a few days ago. See the draft spec for specifics.

Timeplot —

Very nice and functional JavaScript based timeplot library. Looks good, shows data-points on mouse over, approachable API. Good stuff.

Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure —

Interesting. I’ve been using the jquery-1.2.3.js hosted on google code for a few months now. Maybe I should have read the TOS…

Google Doctype —

What Mark Pilgrim has been working on at Google for the past year or so: an encyclopedia of web development.

highlight.js —

JavaScript based source highlighter with support for many languages in separate modules. Similar to the JavaScript Prettifier in that <pre><code> blocks are automatically detected and highlighted without an explicit language class.

What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important? —

Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): “Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandria’s dropped into our laps.”

Presentational JavaScript to adjust text line-height in proportion to text column width. —

“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.

jQuery evangelism —

I need to give jQuery a serious look. Prototype’s Ajax.Request stuff is crippled (no PUT or DELETE) to the point of being worthless; the jQuery selector magic looks a lot more intriguing than what you get with Prototype, too.

Javascript online massive social password cracking ? —

Yes! Please. Make your friends on myspace work for you. Idle CPU is wasted CPU, dontchaknow.

Interview with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails —

Dion Almaer sits down with Yegge to talk about his JavaScript/Rails port. Nice one-on-one video, candid, and thick in technical detail.

The solution is quite clear: each browser tab should have its own thread, in which a separate instance of a JavaScript interpreter executes... —

I had assumed that was already happening today. I really have to dig into the mozilla codebase someday… Seems like it would be worth it to get a better feel for browser internals – even if you weren’t planning hacking on the browser.

Relevance: Silverlight, the DLR, and thee —

“The general thrust of this argument is that having a full-fledge rich-windowing experience in the browser is going to put a stop to all that amateurish mucking around with JavaScript and the DOM. … that’s hogwash.”

Does JavaFX Spell The End Of AJAX? —

Is anyone actually falling for this crap? “‘The goal is to make it so people never have to see code’, said Gosling.” — Gag Me!

mjt —

Browser-side JavaScript template engine with concepts borrowed from Kid. Used by Freebase to drive formatting around JSON. Looks interesting.

Multi-Select Lists vs. Checkboxes —

I’m real close to hating multi-select list boxes right now. Using an overflowed UL of checkboxes has some interesting pros (and cons).

The window.onload problem (still) [peter.michaux.ca] —

Nugget of wisdom: “… developing for the web is frequently about accepting small compromises to big philosophical ideals.”

Implement getElementsByClassName [bugzilla.mozilla.org] —

Awesome. Robert Sayre just checked in his document.getElementsByClassName implementation to mozilla trunk.

What's New in Prototype 1.5? [xml.com] —

Nice review of new features.

Prototype Javascript Framework —

Documentation, finally!

Ajax Start Pages Suck [redmonk.com] —

Anne isn’t pulling any punches :)

Programmer Hierarchy —

Ranks programmers by who they consider themselves superior to. Comedy.

Firebug 1.0 Beta Screencast —

Holy… This is big. Huge big.

gotAPI.com —

The best attempt I’ve seen at splicing multiple API references together. This uses the external documentation but provides indexing and browsing features.

Getting started with extension development - MozillaZine Knowledge Base —

dangerous waters…

Rails RJS Templates —

I’m starting to “get it” now… Makes a ton of sense.

FireBug —

Firefox extension with some promising script debugging/spying features.

Bookmarklet Builder —

Useful…

Javascript Event compatibility tables —

Nice list of DOM events and the varying support of different browsers.

Core JavaScript 1.5 Reference —

Mozilla’s JavaScript Reference..

JavaScript Reference —

Decent javascript reference. I really like the format but the cards are images so you can’t use your browser’s find to locate stuff…

Greasemonkey FUD —

Hi, we’re Forrester Research, a division of Microsoft. — I really didn’t expect Firefox to get this much FUD thrown at it.

JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language —

So true.

XML/XSLT/CSS/JavaScript/ Treeview component.. —

..that rocks. Quite possible the only javascript treeview I’d ever consider using.

JavaScript Toolbox - Calendar Popup To Select Date