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JavaScript

The New Face and Future of JZJS

Hello friends. I wish I could tell you that I have a wonderful new tutorial to show you today, but unfortunately the plan was to feature a guest post. Well that plan fell through, so instead I’ve decided to give you all a sneak peak at what you can expect in the near future for this JavaScript blog. This includes two major things: a new site template and future posts.

JavaScript

requestAnimationFrame: Video Introduction to New Animation Techniques

The arrival of requestAnimationFrame gives browsers the ability to throttle animations to save them from devouring system resources, especially when they aren’t actually being shown on the screen. Knowing this, we need to learn how to use it and then actually start utilizing this new tool for the benefit of our users. For this very reason, I decided to make this short video tutorial explaining how requestAnimationFrame can be used in the animations on your applications.

Uncategorized

Another Failure

Hi everyone. There will be no post from me today (other than this one of course). I worked on the video tutorial for requestAnimationFrame last night and had nearly finished it when I realized that my recording software made a bunch of glitches whenever I was in the Chrome window. I’ll be re-recording it tonight using Firefox, so it’ll be available tomorrow morning. Sorry if I threw off your reading schedule. I’ll post the video as soon as it’s ready.

JavaScript

The Lazy Man's URL Parsing in JavaScript

Have you ever needed to parse a URL using regular expressions? It’s not easy to write regular expressions (for a lot of people, including myself) and it’s even tougher to test to see if that regular expression is reliable across every situation. You could, of course, just copy and paste a regular expression (or function or library) that someone else developed and use that, but I propose that there is a simpler and more concise way of parsing URLs that doesn’t require any regular expressions.

JavaScript

Sleek Animations With requestAnimationFrame

In the world of JavaScript, animation has always been a nuisance. We’ve relied on setTimeout and setInterval for longer than we care to recall. We’ve trusted the millisecond intervals to always be hit right on the mark, even though we all knew that in all likelihood the computer would be so busy with something else that it’d miss the mark we set for it. No longer! We will set aside our old ways and look forward to a great and glorious JavaScript animation future through the use of requestAnimationFrame!

JavaScript

JavaScript Closures and the Module Pattern

One of the most widely used design patterns in JavaScript is the module pattern. The module pattern makes use of one of the nicer features of JavaScript – closures – in order to give you some control of the privacy of your methods so that third party applications cannot access private data or overwrite it. In this post I’ll teach you what a closure is, how it works, and how to utilize it to implement the module pattern in your own JavaScript code.

Reviews

jQuery in Action Book Review

jQuery is without a doubt one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries available today, and for good reason. It’s very good at what it does, but with the great power it offers comes great responsibility. Someone using jQuery incorrectly can wreak havoc across the internet (or at least on their own site). You must learn how to use jQuery properly. This is where a great book comes in very handy, and jQuery In Action is one of those great books.

JavaScript

The Great Semicolon Debate

Recently there has been a large debate about the use (or rather, the lack of use) of the semicolon in JavaScript code. A few words that shouldn’t have been said were said and suddenly people are at each other’s throats. The idea of omitting semicolons isn’t entirely new, but it has hit its stride recently, and it’s starting to crash into the opinions of the traditionals. Here, I’m giving my thoughts on this whole debacle.

Giveaways

Win a $299 Wijmo License! Free Contest

I’ve talked about Wijmo here before, discussing the vast array of widgets that they provide to go above and beyond the jQuery UI library and allow you to easily create a rich user interface for your applications. Well, now I have a $299 commercial license that I’ve decided is more likely to be put to good use by one of my loyal followers (or a first-time visitor too I guess). Read on to see how you can win!

JavaScript

Introduction to Backbone.js Part 5: AJAX – Video Tutorial

Everyone loves AJAX. A few years back it was probably the biggest buzz word in all of web development. Now HTML5 and CSS3 have stolen the show, but AJAX has now taken its place as a first-class citizen among web development - and specifically JavaScript - tools. And to make things even better, Backbone.js has built in support for AJAX and makes it dead simple for you to use it to synchronize your models with a database, as I show in this video tutorial.