It was fascinating to watch the unveiling of Firefox 3 last week. I’m pleased that, in some small way, my contributions helped to bring this browser out the door. First 24 hours: 8.3 million downloads, 69 downloads/second, 20 Gb/s Peak Transfer While I generally focus on issues tangential to JavaScript code, at Mozilla – like […]
Comment · Posted: June 23rd, 2008
One thing that I absolutely adore is the sheer embeddability of JavaScript. It’s a (comparatively) simple language that is fiercely flexible. I tend to liken JavaScript to water – alone it’s painfully simple but it can take the form of its container – and mixing it with anything enhances its flavor. Since JavaScript, alone, is […]
Comment · Posted: June 15th, 2008
The always-excellent Aza Raskin had a little bit of fun recently – inspired by my recent Processing.js work – to port the popular Context Free Art language to JavaScript, using Canvas. Renamed Algorithm Ink the result is a complete way to programmatically generate elegant pieces of artwork. Aza took the result a step further and […]
Comment · Posted: June 11th, 2008
A very cool new utility has just been released by Olav Junker Kjær called Mascara which is an ECMAScript 4 to JavaScript translator (written in Python). Using this utility you can begin writing ECMAScript 4 code today, receiving its full benefits (such as IDE integration and compile-time type-checking) while still being able to run the […]
Comment · Posted: June 10th, 2008
During the past couple weeks I’ve given a number of talks around the globe. Here’s a quick dump of the talks for those that are interested in them. jQuery (BarCamp Boston) Processing and Processing.js (BarCamp Boston) jQuery (MeshU) Managing the Mozilla Way (Slashdot, ITWorld) jQuery (DrupalCamp Toronto) JavaScript 1.5 to 2.0 – A new talk […]
Comment · Posted: June 8th, 2008
A quick snippet that I spotted within the up-and-coming Johnson project (A Ruby/Spidermonkey hybridization.): (function(){ this.__defineGetter__("__FILE__", function() { return (new Error).stack.split("\n")[2].split("@")[1].split(":").slice(0,-1).join(":"); }); })(); The above defines a global variable __FILE__ which, when called, returns the file name of the current JavaScript file. It’s defined using a getter in particular so that the proper file name […]
Comment · Posted: June 7th, 2008
I’m currently in the process of touring the globe (I’ve given four talks in two cities, have two talks in two cities left) but I dug up something that should prove to be a lot of fun. Will Larson has gone about revising the classic Tower Defense genre, porting it to the open web using […]
Comment · Posted: May 27th, 2008
It’s been a little while since I last wrote about Cross-Window Messaging in Firefox 3 using postMessage and since that time it’s since a few API updates. Specifically the postMessage API has become much simpler and has stronger security brought into mind. If you’re unfamiliar with postMessage here’s a quick re-cap: It’s a way to […]
Comment · Posted: May 22nd, 2008
