tag : JavaScript

Walking Through jQuery Plugin Boilerplate

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.

New Project Released: JZ Parse URL jQuery Plugin

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.

Rise and Shine JavaScript Blog

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.

3 Ways to Parse a Query String in a URL

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.