We’ve all heard of Templating, heck I’ve written about templating. Templating is a great way to write HTML that is designed to be manipulated and inserted into a document via JavaScript, but it has a very annoying caveat: it’s a huge pain to make templates external. They pretty much have to be inline, which doesn’t allow you to maintain them separately. That’s all about to change.
As JavaScript moves further and further away from the playground programming language that it used to be, and is used more and more as the core for large-scale applications, managing the code starts to become extremely difficult. Splitting the code into multiple files helps with that, though it also adds more complexity in a different way. One way to fight this new complexity is with dependency management libraries, but which one is right for you?
It’s taken too long, but it’s finally completed. The project page for JZ Parse URL is up with full documentation. You can also find it listed on the projects page. Along with this new project comes a few minor changes to the way the project pages are done: files will no longer be directly downloadable from the site, but instead everything is done on GitHub. Also, I’ve decided to make the documentation in the JavaScript files more minimal and instead just link to the project pages. This update will happen soon and will not bring a new version number.
Everyone has their own style when coding. For some people, the style they use might be so inconsistent that it looks like they used a program to randomize the code layout so it would confuse everyone as much as possible. In general it’s best to use a consistent coding style, for your own sake, and for the sake of everyone else who might look at your code. To keep things consistent you can use a style guide, which will help you remember and use your rules.
A good JavaScript developer, or developer of any kind, knows that it’s very wise to keep up with the times and continually be learning in order to guarantee that their knowledge doesn’t become obsolete. One of the best ways to keep knowledge fresh and up-to-date is to follow blogs that update often, such as this one. But, obviously, this is not the only JavaScript blog out there, and likely not the best. Here, you’ll find the 5 JavaScript blogs I follow the closest and have the most respect for.
As more and more web browsing devices are becoming mobile and/or battery-powered, we need to become more aware of that battery power we use in our applications. Mozilla has come up with a solution for JavaScript that allows us to monitor the battery levels of the devices that our code runs on. Sadly, Firefox is the only browser that has the API implemented, but it shouldn’t be too far in the future before the API is accepted by the other browsers.
Building jQuery plugins can be very fun and is done by many, many people today. The jQuery team has made it pretty darn easy to get up and running creating jQuery plugins, so much so that many JavaScript developers who don’t really know what they are doing jump onto the bandwagon too. This leads to horrible code floating around all over the internet. Thankfully, some very smart people came up with jQuery plugin boilerplates. Today I’ll walk you through one and show you how they make jQuery plugin coding simpler and more organized.
In the advent of the recent URL Parsing tutorials (DOM URL Parsing and Query String Parsing) I’ve decided that we put the knowledge we’ve gained – plus some compatibility fixes – into practice and create a lightweight jQuery plugin that quickly and simply handles all of your URL Parsing needs. Now, rather than using regular expressions (that so few understand) or using the techniques I’ve taught to you yourself, I’ve made it simple to use a single utility function attached to jQuery.
As promised/foretold, Joe Zim’s JavaScript Blog has a shiny new face! I spent way too many hours creating this theme so that you fine people could enjoy this JavaScript blog without straining yourselves from staring at the eyesore that we had previously. I hope everyone appreciates the effort put forth and enjoys the new shine.
It’s not too often that a query string needs to be parsed with JavaScript, but that’s definitely not to say that it never happens. For those rare occurrences when you do need to parse the query string on the front end, there are numerous ways to parse a query string into an object with each parameter being a property of that object. In this article, I’ll show you three of those techniques and let you in on a secret of how I’m using these techniques in my own projects.
