Unfortunately, I am too busy this week to finish the game project that I have been working on. Not wanting to leave you all hanging, I found some noteworthy news:
Ext JS 2.1 Now GPL (was LGPL)
Basically, this means that if you modify the Ext Framework and use it on your project, then your project is also under the GPL license. For more information, check out what Dietrich Kappe wrote on Agile Ajax, Ext JS 2.1 Now GPL (was LGPL).
Hidden Gems in the YAHOO Object
There is a lot of useful functionality attached directly to the YAHOO Object that has not been well noted. Find out more on the YUI Blog, Hidden Gems in the YAHOO Object.
posted by Matt Snider at 4:55 pm
I was impressed to see that Smashing Magazine, an online designer magazine, choose to feature a collection of JavaScript resources this week. Some of them are really useful:
60 More AJAX- and JavaScript Solutions For Professional Coding
Douglas Crockford revisited global variables and decided to change his definition of best practices. The gist of which is, instead of using “var foo = ‘value’;” in the global space, you should use:
/*global foo*/
foo = {};
Find out more: Global Domination, Part Two
posted by Matt Snider at 4:42 pm
New Version of Mint
A new version of mint went live last night. Most of this release was a massive bug scrub and preparation for future releases. However, we have launched an IRA center for those of you looking to put a little money towards retirement, or reduce your taxable income.
Ira Center
YUI 2.5.1
This release introduces YUI configurator and contains additional AIR support, however, it is primarily a bug fix release, cleaning up the issues with version 2.5.
YUI 2.5.1 Released: Improved AIR support, JSON security patch, YUI Configurator, and bug fixes
JSON.js Security Improvement
Douglas Crockford updated his JSON.js with better security to prevent additional unsafe strings from being evaluated.
JSON.js
IE 8 Announcements
There is so much going on with IE 8 that it is hard to follow it all. Fortunately, the Microsoft team has been really good about documenting IE 8, every step of the way. If you haven’t been following, check it out:
IE Blog
I’m Biking to Work Now!
Woot! I only live 5 miles from the office and have been meaning to start biking, but have been reticent to buy a new bike, since my last was stolen. However, with gas prices on the rise and my inability to find time to exercise, it seemed like the right time. Now, I am getting 40 minutes of exercise each day (20 min each way) and saving $40 in gas, every two weeks. This is a seriously sweet investment:
Trek 7.5 fx
posted by Matt Snider at 9:34 am
The IE blog announced today the development tools that they plan to include in IE 8. As a developer, I am pleased to see a FireBug like interface:
Improved Productivity Through Internet Explorer 8 Development Tools.
The company Mofuse has a toolkit that allows you to convert your website into a mobile version, targeting specific platforms. While it is better to design in a standards compliant way and only maintain one version of your site. Sometimes, the manufacturers just won’t let you. Check this out:
Mofuse
Also, Christian Heilmann talks about YUI evolution:
Christian Heilmann’s Talk on YUI at GeekUp Leeds
posted by Matt Snider at 3:26 pm
Lots of new and improvements on existing features. It also looks like they fixed the bug that was causing TextNodes to be treated as Arrays in the Dom.get() method.
YUI 2.5
posted by Matt Snider at 7:46 pm
Kung Hei Fat Choi (wishing you a prosperous new year)! Last week was Chinese New Year, which kept me busy since last Thursday (that and the new Mint rollout), so I was unable to write an article on Friday. However, I did keep up on the news over the weekend and here are some highlights:
Mint News
Last Thursday we rolled out a new version of Mint that supports investment accounts and uses the latest version of Really Simple History. We have also revamped the Add Account process, so check it out.
JavaScript News
posted by Matt Snider at 3:58 pm
Sorry about the lack of article for Tuesday: I am extremely busy at Mint this week and then spent 9 hours at the hospital (without a my laptop power cable), which pretty much killed any time I had to write an article. Instead here is some good news for Front-End Engineers:
Prototype 1.6.0.2
Prototype 1.6.0.2 has been released with several bugs fixes, including support for Opera 9.25 and a promise to support future version of Opera.
IE7 is Now AutoUpdate
Microsoft is intending to do an auto-update of Internet explorer on the 12th February. So awesome… so awesome. Need I say more!?
HTML 5 Drafted
HTML 5 Seems more complicated to me than it it worth, but here it is anyway.
posted by Matt Snider at 11:12 am
I am going to forgo the normal article this week, because there is so much talk about compatibility mode in IE8. As any web developer knows, IE6 and lower is different from IE7 is different from the W3C standards. The problem is that as IE improved the engineers at Microsoft not only needed to support standards, but also the thousands of people who had already built websites according to the previous, non-standard compliant versions of IE. This continued up through IE6, then when they released IE7, Microsoft took a different route, supporting more standards, but being less backwards compatible with IE6. As a result the web community cried foul, frustrated at having to support yet another browser (and one that is not completely standards compliant at that).
Enter IE8… IE8 is standards compliant, as we all learned when it passed the acid test. However, it is not backwards compliant with IE7 or IE6 and the engineers realized that there did not yet exist a good way to allow backwards compatibility, which they would need to support their, “don’t break the web” mantra. As a result, they have introduced an IE8+ only meta tag (it won’t affect any other browser at all) that allows the web designer to specify which browser their site is compliant to.
Example 1: Meta Tag
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />
This solution is simple, elegant, and degrades nicely. My hat is off to Microsoft on this one; I believe they are doing this browser right.
Here are some key articles about this topic:
Compatibility and IE8 by Microsoft
The versioning switch is not a browser detect by PPK
Beyond Doctype by A List Apart
posted by Matt Snider at 9:35 am
No article for Tuesday this week. However, there has been some big news in the JavaScript community:
YUI has added a CSS selector utility, Flash graphing, plus a whole lot more.
ExtJs has improved their already impressive client-side application management system, with additional desktop-like features.
Really Simple History now supports Safari, uses the Module Pattern, and many other additional improvements.
posted by Matt Snider at 10:10 am
This is a topic I mention fairly often, but have not taken the time to write an article about. Fortunately, there is a lot of good information already available on the web. Chris Heilmann of Yahoo, Inc. and owner of the blog “Wait till I come!” just posted his thoughts, which he summarized into 7 rules:
http://icant.co.uk/articles/seven-rules-of-unobtrusive-javascript/
Here are some other useful resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript
http://www.onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejavascript/
The future of web programming is unobtrusive JavaScript, just look at the major portal companies and how they are separating JavaScript from design. If you have not invested the time to properly understand it, there is never a better time than now ^_^.
posted by Matt Snider at 12:33 am