In my previous post I pointed out the Firebug presentation by Joe Hewitt over at Yahoo’s UI Theater. This really is a treasure trove of videos a that is worth exploring. In particular, I’d like to bring your attention to two series: The JavaScript Programming Language presented by Douglas Crockford, and the followup, Advanced Javascript.

These videos are long, but if you’re looking for a way to get started with javascript and you want to understand it completely, they are fantastic resources. I’ve learned a lot from watching them, though finding the time is a challenge.

I’ve emailed Douglas to see if he’d be willing to give this presentation here, but in the mean time, dig in to these excellent videos.

What are you waiting for? Get Firebug now.

One year and twelve days later I am happy to announce that the leopard’s growl has been quieted to a purr, clearing the path for the final Firebug 1.0 to make its way in the world.

If you read this blog, that won’t mean much to you personally since you’re probably already using 1.0 beta. However, there are still tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who are still using 0.4.1 and are going to get a very nice present the next time they restart Firefox.

Thanks to all the people who have supported Firebug during its infancy, especially those who have contributed new ideas and donations to the project. We’re just getting started here! If nothing else, I hope Firebug inspires the makers of other browsers to invest more time in development tools. The web development paradigm wants to evolve, but we can’t build the future with yesterday’s hammer.

via Ajaxian.

Ben Alex of Interface 21 has written a detailed post on Java to JavaScript compilation.

The article discusses some of the choices out there (GWT, OpenLaszlo) and goes into an open source alternative called Java2Script Pacemaker.

Spring integration is shown and available for download and it concludes:

J2S promises some attractive benefits for projects that require JavaScript compilation or a web browser implementation of SWT. It also interoperates successfully with a Spring backend. J2S’ deliberate choice to leverage proven existing technologies such as AST and SWT make it a good example of reusing existing code and developer skills, in turn lowering adoption barriers and the prospect of material API change. If you consider yourself an early adopter, SWT devotee, or need a client-centric, web-based user interface that is built upon the mature SWT UI framework, it is definitely worth taking a closer look at J2S.

Does SWT support do it for you?

I’ve updated my Mootools Tutorial for the upcoming version 1.0 of the library. It (the library) is still in development, so my tutorial is likely to always be a little behind the svn, but if you’re digging into Mootools for the first time, or you want to see what’s different in version 1.0, here’s the place to start.

I’ve also installed a copy of docuwiki for all my example and tutorial work. The old stuff is still there but I’ll be moving it all over to the wiki. Expect to see more examples of code I’ve written in the coming weeks.

So I spent an entire day discovering a quirk about javascript that I must now share. In a previous post on creating default settings for classes/objects I discussed the following technique:

var Widget = new Class({
	initialize: function(element, options){
		this.element = element;
		this.options = Object.extend({
			offsetX: 0,
			offsetY: 0
		}, options || {});
		this.setPosition();
	},
	setPosition: function(){
		this.element.setStyles({
			left: this.options.offsetX + 'px',
			top: this.options.offsetY + 'px'
		});
	}
});

Now, this isn’t a very useful class, but it illustrates the technique. The functions in our class don’t have to worry if the options are defined; they are either what the default value is or they are what the user passed in. If the user elects to just pass in a subset of the values, that’s fine:

var myWidget = new Widget(myElement, {offsetX: 100});
//myElement will be offset by 100 on the left,
//zero (the default) on the top

But what if you want to extend the functionality of your class later? What if you want to be able to insert more default options?

Here’s what I was doing that caused me trouble: Read the rest of this entry »