The JavaScript development community has been welcoming new and powerful tools by the dozens each year, almost too fast for mortals to keep up with. Many of these tools come with npm packages that you can install globally so you can use the command line tool from anywhere on your computer. This can be very convenient, but is it the right way to do it? Is there a better alternative?
It’s been months since I’ve given you all any content here. I’m trying to break that trend, but it will be a while and will take some major changes in order to start writing regularly again. This post isn’t even a full post. Rather, it is an announcement to bring your attention to a post I wrote elsewhere.
When I first heard about the next version of JavaScript - known as ECMAScript 6 (ES6 for short) or JavaScript Harmony - I got really excited about all of the new features that we’d be getting to simplify and improve our lives as JavaScript developers… until I thought about it for 5 more seconds and realized that my kids would probably all be grown and moved out before I didn’t need to support any browsers that don’t support ES6, so I may never actually get to use it. I’m discovering that ES6 might be more usable right now than I thought it would be.
HTML5 is a lot more than just a few cool new semantic tags. The HTML5 specification actually has a bunch of new JavaScript APIs for us all to work with. Not all of these specs are finalized and they’re not all widely implemented in browsers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t take advantage of them right now, though. Let’s look at a few of the ones that I’m most excited for and discuss if and how they can be used today.
Most browsers have a bug that isn’t really a bug. In fact it was purposely put there to make your simpler, but if you (or someone else writing the HTML code) do something in the right (read “WRONG!”) way, it could completely blow up. Specifically, if you assign your input tags a name or id attribute of “action” or “submit”, you can cause some very well hidden bugs.
Promises are currently the best tool we have for asynchronous programming and they appear to be our best hope for the forseeable future, even if they’ll be hiding behind generators or async functions. For now, we’ll need to use promises directly, so we should learn some good techniques for using them right now, especially when dealing with asynchronous operations on collections, whether they happen in parallel or sequentially.
ECMAScript version 5 is the latest complete version of JavaScript available and is implemented in every major browser, but ES6 is in the works and promises a much better world for JavaScript developers with features such as a simple class syntax, arrow functions, built-in promises and the like. It doesn’t stop there, though; we’re already looking ahead to ES7 while ES6 is still cooking in the oven. In particular, I’m extremely excited about asynchronous functions.
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually been on here teaching you something; 9 months since my last actual tutorial and really useful article. Sorry about that! I’m trying to get back on track now though. You should see much more frequent posting and hopefully some very useful posts. Anyway, this tutorial is about a great idea I implemented at work that involved the Adapter and Facade patterns. After using these patterns in this way, I have a much deeper respect for them and I want you to share that repect, so let’s take a look at some awesome ways/reasons to use them!
You all know that this site has been relatively inactive for quite a while. Well, I’m here to let you all know that big things are coming in the future. I wish I could say they will be coming soon, but until the book I’ve been writing it finished, I won’t be able to provide much, if any, content here for you all. Coming in early 2014, though, everyone should be happier. Here’s an update on the future of this blog.
Hi everyone! It’s been nearly two months since I’ve written my own post. This is pretty much unacceptable, but I do have some good excuses. Are you willing to listen to them? Or are you just gonna ignore this? Whatever, either way I don’t care too much. I just want to give an update on what is going on around here so you know what to expect and aren’t disappointed when you don’t see anything going on.
