Following
Providing an API
Supporting legacy browsers
Each script loader that I looked at seemed to place a different emphasis on each of these areas. RequireJS has a lot of code for its module-based API ; LABjs has a simpler chained API which is a little more focused on the first problem.
Script Insertion
In Loading Scripts Without Blocking by Steve Souders, various non-blocking loading techniques are compared. Steve summarises with the following …
…node-postgres , better known as pg ) builds strings of SQL using a simple API . It uses the kind of chained API that suits this kind of problem:
var sql = require ( 'sql' ) , user , query ; user = sql . define ({ name : 'user' , columns : [ 'id' , 'email' , 'lastLogin' ] }); query = user . select ( user . id , user . email ) . from ( user ) . where ( user . lastLogin . lt ( new Date ()));
It's still a major work in progress, …
…way through our upgrade we realized that we badly needed unit tests to validate that our existing API s and features had no regressions. So we used a JS unit testing tool built by our own Nickolay Platonov over the past two years and optimized it for testing Ext JS applications.
Developing our Ext JS code in a test driven fashion completely changes the game for us and our new testing tool ( codename ‘Siesta') helped us a great deal in making sure that we didn't break our …
Tidbits
YUI updated and cleaned up its website . There's a little discussion happening at Hacker News as well, with a lot of interaction with the YUI developers.
Avoiding The Quirks: Lessons From A JavaScript Code Review - Addy Osmani gives a series of quick tips for writing your JavaScript
The Backbone.js Todo List Refactored - Part 2: Being Reactionary
Debugging the Filesystem API (HTML5Rocks)
…it's still quite sad. Sadly, a team I worked with was doing some really great work on upgrading the API for a new release, but it looks like that will never see the light of day. That being said, even with all their effort, Google has been ahead of the game for years and with many more resources, making sure that all potential competitors are playing a losing game.
Sadly, this also means all of Christian Heilmann's old geo-mashups are going to die...
Yahoo also …
…developers will have to use the JavaScript bindings to Windows Direct graphics API s and distribute their apps only as Windows apps. Similarly, media capture and Device API s are missing and given the thrust of the strategy, seem unlikely to show up anytime soon. These are the types of API 's that Microsoft wants you to consume via native bindings.
And What Will Ship?
If you couldn't tell already (!) we're very excited by Windows 8 and IE10. We think it …
How the Guardian's custom CMS & API helped take content strategy to a traditional publisher - Martin Belam blogs about UX, information architecture, digital media and his work at The Guardian on currybetdotnet . This post explains the importance of the right tools ( API!) for publishing and managing content on today's " Splinternet."
Havi can be found on Twitter as @ freshelectrons
Janet Swisher
Rick Waldron shows …
…implementations on their implementation of the DOM. Most recently the Range API has been integrated to make it unambiguous how node trees and ranges work together. Read its goals section to get an idea of the scope.
In addition, the Clipboard API , also developed by the W3C WebApps WG, has been updated with a fully defined processing model.
Feedback on all these changes is very much appreciated!
Security
The W3C launched a Web Security Interest Group …
…deserves from developers: the geolocation API. Firefox has supported this API for a long time and you can do some pretty cool things with it.
So, what is the Geolocation API? In essence it allows you to detect where the user of your product is at the moment. The location data is found by different means: GPS location, mobile phone masts or wireless hub location. If you turn off wireless on your laptop and you have no G3 connectivity, the API will not be able to get any data.
Using …
The reason they stopped working was that Firebug changed its API from version 1.8 in how it exposes information to various extensions, and as a result, some extensions broke. I spoke to Firebug lead developer Jan " Honza" Odvarko and discussed the best way to ensure compatibility. A couple of quick pointers from him and my extensions were working again!
I hope you will find good use for them - personally, I enjoyed trying them out and testing things again.
Install …