It may not be ready for production, but the release candidate for version 3 of Twitter Bootstrap is a huge change from 2.3 and has me very excited about its future. Sadly, they have done very little related to JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. Let’s take a quick look at some of the major changes appearing in Twitter Bootstrap 3, CSS and JavaScript alike.
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.
One of the projects here on Joe Zim’s JavaScript blog is a Pub/Sub jQuery plugin that allows you to do the simple and generic subscribe, unsubscribe, and publish capabilities that you already find in jQuery (through on/bind, off/unbind, and trigger) but without all the extra overhead that jQuery has. JZ Publish/Subscribe has been updated to 1.4 and features a simple bug fix. You can also read about what to expect in 2.0, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s been a little while since I’ve taken a look at JZ Publish/Subscribe, but recently I had a great idea to fix a problem I was having trouble solving. Mix that in with a few more bits of context capability and you have the version 1.3 release of JZ Publish/Subscribe. Go ahead and read a little more to get the scoop on this great idea and how it will make using JZ Publish/Subscribe more stable.