Prototype 1.5.0 has a new release candidate. New stuff since my last post: awesome DOM navigation via Element.(up|down|next|previous), Array.uniq, and a few bug fixes. There’s some more cool stuff in the pipeline.
A smorgasbord of commits to the Prototype SVN repo, after four months of inactivity. Method chaining, new Element.Methods, object cloning, and this patch I wrote a while back. This is a meat‐filled and much‐needed update.
Freshen up your JavaScript, a presentation given by Sam Foster and me at the Refresh Austin meeting earlier this month. If you’re in Austin and you’re reading this blog, you probably ought to be a Refresh member.
Today’s wonk porn is going to talk about iterators — one of JavaScript 1.7‘s cool new features — and how it relates to polymorphism. Grab a recent nightly build of Firefox 2.0 in order to play along.
I’d welcome work on improving JavaScript as a language and browser implementations to support further application‐controlled sandboxing and data hiding. The same‐domain policy is far too coarse grained a solution for the applications we’d like to be able to write.
Holy crap! The WebKit JS engine has matured by leaps and bounds since the last Safari release. I knew about XPath support, but not about getters/setters, direct access to DOM prototypes (which had been accessible in a convoluted manner), or XSLT. They claim it’s also 20–30% faster. I pray this stuff will make it into a Safari release that isn’t Leopard‐only.
ScriptDoc, an open standard being developed by the Aptana dudes (with help from John Resig of JQuery). JavaScript needs an authoritative documentation format, so if you’re a JS developer, sign up for the forums and start participating!
These days I write PHP code infrequently enough that my JavaScript knowledge is starting to get in the way. I learned PHP years before I ever touched JavaScript, but the syntaxes are similar enough that I keep trying to use the var keyword or assign functions to variables. (Even though I’ll probably never start a major project in PHP ever again, I enjoy using the language — it was my first real programming language, and without it I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do today.)
I took great interest in Sylvain Zimmer’s optimized version of Prototype’s $$ function, since I’ve been working on something very similar recently. Sylvain’s version uses more workmanlike string parsing; mine uses XPath. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses.
Pluvo, a new programming language written in Python. The syntax is a little strange, but having a “uri” datatype for file I/O is a ridiculously good idea. (*cough* Ruby 2 feature request *cough*)