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2 April, 2009 12:39 am

Is Jquery really that much more trendy?

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript | 2 Comments

Using Google Trend for website, I added 5 popular javascript framework website and the above chart is the result.

Is jquery.com just that much more appealing than the other framework sites or the actual framework is just that much more popular?

1 April, 2009 1:45 pm

Standalone JavaScript Selector Engines

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript | 0 Comment

One of the most used and helpful feature of any Javascript framework is probably their selector function. It allows us to search and filter elements using CSS like selector syntax. This means it takes out the tedious part in DOM scripting and enables developers to write less and more reliable code. As a result, we all expect to see some sort of selector engine in all javascript framework.

However, there are still rooms for improvement and reasons to have standalone selector engines that are not part of any framework. Since selecting elements are the most common operational you would do, any improvement would increase the overall performance of your script.

Looking at recent development, there are definitely people believing the need for standalone selector. Here are 4 robust and small standalone Selector engines you can check out.

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18 February, 2009 12:18 am

Cloud based Code Editing with Bespin

Posted by Richard Wong under Development, Tools, Web Apps | 2 Comments

After about 4 months without posting anything, I really want to get myself going again by starting with a small post about the latest projects from Mozilla Labs.

As for most us who develop for the web, Mozilla Firefox are already our default browser as its add-on structure gave us many essential tools in development. So it’s very exciting to see their lab coming out with experimental project that focus on developers.

Bespin was launched last week as an open extensible web-based code editors aiming to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

Without me repeating too much, here is an introduction video from Mozilla:

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

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22 October, 2008 10:26 am

Advanced Data Visualization Tools using Javascript

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript | 17 Comments

With the advance in computer graphics, the way we visualize data have changed drastically in the last 20 years. Visualization Software are developed to take advantage of the graphical power of local computers. But now everything is changing with the Internet. We are consuming a large amount of data online and the desire and expectation to visualizing those data is increasing too. So we need to look at solutions to visualize data for the web.

There are already server side tools or libraries that generate complex graphics. But I think that is not always the best solution. A lot of the visuals could be done on the client side with the browser. It is quite logical to send just the data and let the browser handle the rendering and interaction.

Of course there are a number of client side technology you could use including Flash, Sliverlight, or even Java Applet. But here I want to show you some amazing open source tools built with pure Javascript. With most of the browsers improving their Javascript engines, Javascript is really becoming quite powerful and people are doing a lot of cool stuffs with it and here are some of them:

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20 October, 2008 11:38 pm

Attractive Javascript Logging Console – Blackbird

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript, Tools | 3 Comments

Everyone who programmed in Javascript will know that one of the most common way to debug across browsers is the alert() function. Although, you can use tools like Firebug and their console api to output. It doesn’t work on IE or Safari. So a pure Javascript based solution would be great.

Blackbird is one of the latest script that does just that. It offers:

a dead-simple way to log messages in JavaScript and an attractive console to view and filter them. You might never use alert() again.

All you need to do is include the Blackbird script and style. Then you can start logging messages using their APIs including different message types and profiling as shown below:

log.debug( message )

Add a debug message to Blackbird

message: the string content of the debug message

log.info( message )

Add an info message to Blackbird

message: the string content of the info message

log.warn( message )

Add a warning message to Blackbird

message: the string content of the warn message

log.error( message )

Add an error message to Blackbird

message: the string content of the warn message

log.profile( label )

Start/end a time profiler for Blackbird. If a profiler named string does not exist, create a new profiler. Otherwise, stop the profiler string and display the time elapsed (in ms).

Blackbird