Javascript

Learn the quirky parts of Javascript

Richard Wong 3 April, 2011

by Ivo Wetzel and Zhang Yi Jiang is a collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript language with a lot of code examples.

This is a very good read for developers already working with javascript. I’m sure you will find things in there that are new to you.

The whole doc is open source and hosted on GitHub built with Node.js using template.

Lazy Javascript Loader

Richard Wong 30 March, 2010

I was involved in a project recently with some heavy use of Javascript. We needed to load many javascript files on the page. Because of the site structure and the legacy system, there are potential situations where the same javascript is loaded more than once. To over come that, we needed something that can handle the script loading for us.

After looking at many options, we decided to write our own quick and dirty lazy script loader which will fit our need.

The key features we want from it are:

  • Dynamically creating a script tag to load any scripts we want
  • Handle callbacks
  • Handle duplicate script load
  • Small in size and simple api
  • Framework independent

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Is Jquery really that much more trendy?

Richard Wong 2 April, 2009

Using Google Trend for website, I added 5 popular javascript framework website and the above chart is the .

Is jquery.com just that much more appealing than the other framework sites or the actual framework is just that much more popular?

Standalone JavaScript Selector Engines

Richard Wong 1 April, 2009

Ferrari Engine

One of the most used and helpful feature of any Javascript framework is probably their selector function. It allows us to search and filter elements using CSS like selector syntax. This means it takes out the tedious part in DOM scripting and enables developers to write less and more reliable code. As a result, we all expect to see some sort of selector engine in all javascript framework.

However, there are still rooms for improvement and reasons to have standalone selector engines that are not part of any framework. Since selecting elements are the most common operational you would do, any improvement would increase the overall performance of your script.

Looking at recent development, there are definitely people believing the need for standalone selector. Here are 4 robust and small standalone Selector engines you can check out.

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Advanced Data Visualization Tools using Javascript

Richard Wong 22 October, 2008

With the advance in computer graphics, the way we visualize data have changed drastically in the last 20 years. Visualization Software are developed to take advantage of the graphical power of local computers. But now everything is changing with the Internet. We are consuming a large amount of data online and the desire and expectation to visualizing those data is increasing too. So we need to look at solutions to visualize data for the web.

There are already server side tools or libraries that generate complex graphics. But I think that is not always the best solution. A lot of the visuals could be done on the client side with the browser. It is quite logical to send just the data and let the browser handle the rendering and interaction.

Of course there are a number of client side technology you could use including Flash, Sliverlight, or even Java Applet. But here I want to show you some amazing open source tools built with pure Javascript. With most of the browsers improving their Javascript engines, Javascript is really becoming quite powerful and people are doing a lot of cool stuffs with it and here are some of them:

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