JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford has left Yahoo, the company he is most associated with, and has joined eBay’s PayPal.
However, PayPal’s decision to hire Mr. Crockford was not an easy one. He went through a grueling interview process. Club AJAX has managed to get ahold of the transcript of that interview, and we have posted the top ten questions Mr. Crockford was asked.
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In my previous article I showed the differences between scope and context, basic problems that arise and how to fix them. If you are just using some JavaScript and maybe jQuery, an understanding of scope is all that is needed to get you by. Once you start using objects or namespaces however, you’ll start to run into issues with context and will need to use the keyword this. But when you get into object oriented JavaScript, you’ll need an advanced understanding of context and how to make it work for you. To do this, we’ll use the call() and apply() methods, and then a backwards compatible version of the new feature Mozilla recently released in JavaScript 1.8.5 called bind().
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In forums and other places I often see people incorrectly use the term scope when they should be using the term context. Scope applies to the variable and functional access of a function, whereas context is the property and method access of a function. Essentially, scope is function-based, and context is object-based.
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MDV or “model-driven views”, eschews the concept of widgets in favor of template-based views which are behavior-based and update themselves when the data has changed.
Max Motovilov gave a presentation on MDV which was enlightening and thought provoking. He showed how he leveraged The Dojo Toolkit to create behaviors and data stores which update his views through his custom-built template system.
Max’s detailed presentation can be seen here, and you can also see the examples he used on GitHub.
A memo from a Google employee was leaked earlier this month exposing the new plan for Dart, which they claim to be a new programming language for structured web programming. The memo goes into some detail on what Dart would be, but doesn’t go into much detail on why Dart should be. In other words, it doesn’t explicitly state the deficiencies in JavaScript. Do they have a point? Should JavaScript be replaced?
For object inheritance, I had been using the traditional method of assigning methods and properties to the function’s prototype. Because my project was relatively simple, I could get away with this for a while. But as the project grew in scope, using the prototype started proving unwieldy. It worked, but the code was getting messy and hard to read. I decided it was time to implement an inheritance system. Not too complex, just something to help me organize my code. I ended up creating what I call my Declare Inheritance Helper.
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“Obviously, due to the success of jQuery and the lack of base-knowledge of JavaScript”, Brendan explained at a recent gathering, “JavaScript is a huge failure. I’ve redesigned it to look like jQuery, and will implement it, retroactively, into the web.” (more…)
A new video is posted from the January 4th 2011 Club AJAX meeting. Basic and advanced code for Ajax apps. The main subjects covered were CSS organizing, and OO-CSS concepts, and an HTML5 Video Player with custom JavaScript.
This is the second video in the Dev vs Dev series, using the XtraNormal movie maker. What does it sound like when a front end developer suggests to a back end developer that a project should use JavaScript? It might sound something like the following.
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What does a conversation between a new front end developer and a back end developer sound like? Using XtraNormal, I’ve created a video based on past experience. While this focuses on a Java developer, it is a compilation from ASP and PHP guys as well. If you’re a back end developer you should still see the humor in this. And if you don’t — then you resemble that remark!
If you’ve never seen an XtraNormal video, they don’t move a lot (my wife asked if they were going to fight). They are animated characters having a conversation. I think the humor comes out of the lack of emotion due to the computer generated voices.
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Club AJAX proudly uses HTML4.1 Transitional! (We had the HTML5
logo on here, but didn't think that logo was as cool).
