If you’ve read my last post or have just been keeping up with the JavaScript world at all, you’ve probably heard about Backbone.js. Well, this is the beginning of a tutorial series for Backbone.js and with this new series also comes a new media type: video! Today’s video tutorial teaches you how to get started using the M from MVC: the model. It’s pretty simple, yet pretty awesome and powerful.
As the internet gets smarter and smarter and JavaScript starts piling up on web pages, we need to learn to organize our code. The days of filling the global namespace with all the functions we can think of are long over and have become far too difficult to maintain. Along with many other design patterns, the MVC (model, view, controller) pattern can bring order to the chaotic spaghetti of your JavaScript code. Right now, the de facto JavaScript MVC framework library is Backbone.js.
jQuery plugins are popping up all over the place and just about everyone is trying to get in on the action. What determines whether a plugin is good or bad for you is largely up to your opinion and your requirements, but there are few things that you can do when writing your plugins to guarantee at least a bit of quality and standardization in your plugins that everyone who looks at your plugin code will be thankful for.
Sliders and Carousels are one of the coolest ways to display information on websites. They can contain tons of information in a smaller area, and the animation of automatic sliding and the large, beautiful images that are usually included draw the user’s attention. Well, I’ll show you how to set up an awesome carousel with jQuery and the Roundabout plugin.
jQuery is one of the most popular (if not the most) JavaScript libraries in existence and a great number of people use it to do some amazing things. Personally, jQuery is what got me excited for learning JavaScript. The problem is that a lot of programmers don’t understand that with all that power massive amounts of CPU cycles are used. As much as jQuery engineers try to optimize jQuery, they are always limited in how fast they can make it go. There are a few things that you, as a user of jQuery, can do to make your jQuery code faster.
Most of the time cookies are handled by the server using languages like PHP or Ruby, but there are times when using JavaScript to handle the cookies is the best option. Cookies are a strange beast in JavaScript and many developers don’t know how to use them. That’s all about to change!
If you’ve been using JavaScript for any semi-substantial amount of time, you’ve probably had to add some HTML to your page dynamically. If you haven’t then you’re missing out on some of the greatest power of JavaScript. There’s a problem though: It’s a pain in the buttocks to write HTML code inside a JavaScript string – especially when it’s a large amount of HTML and/or some of the tags have attributes – and adding in values from variables. It’s just a giant mess of quotes and plus signs.
It’s a great day here at Joe Zim’s JavaScript Blog and surely a great day for the users of the JZ Publish/Subscribe jQuery plugin. This plugin has now been updated to version 1.2 and has gained probably the best feature it could gain at this point in its life and something that, arguably, maybe should have already been included with the plugin.
If you don’t already know, JZ Publish/Subscribe is a jQuery plugin that I developed to add a simple, but powerful Pub/Sub feature to the jQuery utility functions. I’m guessing there are some people out there who don’t understand what Pub/Sub is, how to use it, or why to use it. I’m here to bring some answers and give a specific example of how JZ Publish/Subscribe can be used.
All of you JavaScript lovers out there who have been following this blog recently will probably know already that I recently released a jQuery plugin to add Publish/Subscribe functionality. The Announcement was posted just a few days ago. Well, I decided I can’t just leave the information about the plugin in a post that will fade into the ages of the archive, so I created a Projects page, which you can access via the link on the main navigation bar.