The internet is full of great JavaScript resources, many of which I’m sure are well known by a large portion of the JavaScript developer community. There are, however, a few places that are especially good but go unnoticed by the majority of the world. Here, I wish to bring to light two of those resources in the hopes that their efforts would affect the community in a more substantial way.
In JavaScript, functions are an integral part of development. They are what contain all of our amazing functionality (hence the name function) and run it whenever we deem worthy. With functions we can make code nonlinear, more organized, and easier to understand. We can also do some crazy stuff with functional programming.
JavaScript is an interesting language. It is quite different from any other language I’ve used, and it takes a while to really notice and understand the nuances if you don’t have a good way of learning. I’ve decided to start a Fundamentals series to help push the more basic knowledge out to a wider public, since I’ve noticed many non-expert JavaScript programmers frequenting the blog. Today, we’ll start with Objects.
Backbone.js introduced us to a more modular way of developing today’s web applications by separating our code into semantic and reusable pieces. Backbone’s main crutch was that it offered only the bare minimum so that it was easy to learn and didn’t force you to do anything that you didn’t want to do, but we were left on our own to figure out how to handle much of the implementation details. Marionette is here to help with that.
JavaScript applications continue to grow as the web grows. We’re all learning that using application frameworks, such Backbone.js, Ember, Knockout, AngularJS, and countless others, but do these frameworks offer everything that we need? According to some very smart JavaScript programmers, there’s still a little more needed if you want a truly scalable JavaScript application.
Twitter Bootstrap has a lot to offer to make the creation of web applications simpler, especially in the way of visual design, but it’s not all HTML and CSS. Twitter Bootstrap offers some very nice functionality built in via some jQuery plugins. Everything from Tooltips to modal boxes, from scroll spying to carousels, there are some very useful tools here to ease your development.
Recently, there have been numerous JavaScript libraries released that make creating presentations in the web browser _somewhat_simple, and many geeks are jumping on the chance to depend less on Microsoft and start using their web development skills in new domains. This is an introduction to one of those libraries and a demonstration on how to extend it to make your job as a presenter even easier.
Well, you probably are doing it wrong. jQuery’s html function is a very nice way to replace the contents of an element with new contents. Its usefulness is supposedly limited, though, according to the API documentation for this method. Every day jQuery users use this powerful method in a way that it was never meant to be used, and it works, but does that mean we should still do it?
Today, we’re going to cover how to turn your Node.js script into a native command-line utility, and then how to share it with the world using NPM (Node Package Manager). In the video, I’m using the trial-and-error approach to show you everything that is required and show the errors you might encounter along the way if you forget a step. It’s actually quite simple.
In Backbone.js, rendering views is really simple, yet not so much. It’s simple because Backbone doesn’t force you into doing it any specific way, so you have freedom to just use a bit of jQuery and dump the HTML into an element. Then again, since it doesn’t implement anything on its own, we’re stuck writing our own implementations, making it more difficult than it could otherwise be. In the case of rendering subviews, things can definitely get a little more difficult.