category : JavaScript

JavaScript

Polyfilling HTML5 and CSS3 With Modernizr

HTML5 and CSS3 offer web developers a lot of great options for making their websites much more beautiful and with much less work than what was previously possible. There’s one looming problem though: the lack of browser support. Thankfully, though, many JavaScript developers have been hard at work creating shims and polyfills to bring these wonderful capabilities to even the most feeble browsers.

JavaScript

Minecraft + Node.js + Socket.io = Awesome

Have you ever found programming extremely enjoyable? I hope so, otherwise you probably shouldn’t be programming. Well, either way, I found a whole new way of making programming fun: integrating new programming technologies to make your games even easier to use! In this article in video, I show you how I gave myself and my friends the ability to completely control my Minecraft servers through a simple web application interface using Node.js and Socket.io.

JavaScript

August Update: Appliness and js13kGames

There are a couple of cool things going on around the internet that I felt should be shared with all of you. First of all is Appliness, a digital, monthly web development magazine that pools some of the greatest articles from around the web and compiles them into an interactive book. Second is a JavaScript and HTML5 game competition known as js13kGames. Too many lower case letters there if you ask me.

JavaScript

Automatic Minification With Node.js and RequireJS

Last time we talked about how to use NPM and some of the command line utilities that you can install that are built using Node.js. Today, we’re actually going to build a small command line utility ourselves that can be a bit of a time saver. We’re going to use the RequireJS optimizer to automatically concatenate and minify our CSS files the moment any of them are changed.

JavaScript

NPM and Using Node as a Command Line Tool

Node.js was made to bring JavaScript to the web server so that people could use the same language on their front and back end, but that’s not its only possibility. Though it might not be extremely well suited for it, Node.js can still allow you to run command line tools easily. Many of the packages on NPM are command-line tools that make your workflow much smoother. Let’s take a look at some.

JavaScript

JZ Publish/Subscribe Updated to 1.4

One of the projects here on Joe Zim’s JavaScript blog is a Pub/Sub jQuery plugin that allows you to do the simple and generic subscribe, unsubscribe, and publish capabilities that you already find in jQuery (through on/bind, off/unbind, and trigger) but without all the extra overhead that jQuery has. JZ Publish/Subscribe has been updated to 1.4 and features a simple bug fix. You can also read about what to expect in 2.0, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.

JavaScript

Node.js for True Beginners

I remember trying to get into starting with Node.js months ago and, to be frank, it wasn’t the simplest process. Installation was a hassle, and pretty much required the use of a Linux of Mac computer. Now, Node.js has evolved to the point where just about anyone can get started using Node.js (maybe not my grandparents, but they don’t even have a computer). Let’s get started!

JavaScript

Backbone Application Walkthrough Part 5: RequireJS - Video Tutorial

Finally! We’ve made it to the end of the Backbone.js Application Walkthrough video tutorial series. In this final video, we make few small adjustments for the sake of organization and a bunch of other changes that convert the application to work using RequireJS. Almost every file gets touched in this video, but each only receives minor changes in order to create an overall major change in modularity and optimization.

JavaScript

Backbone Application Walkthrough Part 4: It Lives! - Video Tutorial

We’ve made it to part 4 of this Backbone application walkthrough series. This time we finally get the app to do something worthwhile… like work! The application finally lives as we implement the router and hit the “GO” button. Check out the power of the router and don’t forget that just because it’s running, does not mean we’re done. The next and final video in this series converts the application to work with AMD and RequireJS.

JavaScript

Backbone.js Application Walkthrough Part 3: New View and External Templating – Video Tutorial

Moving on to part 3 of the Backbone Application Walkthrough video series, we work on moving all of the templates to external files to reduce the dependency on the templates being included in the index.html file and so that they might become available if we use these views on different pages. Also, I added an extra view that wasn’t in the original application because, as you’ll see in the video, it makes things a little nicer.