Hot damn — Safari has a JavaScript debugger now. I’m really impressed with the WebKit project’s recent progress toward a better platform for JavaScript.
Using Ajax for HTTP Authentication within an HTML form. Clever use of Ajax that transcends the buzzword phenomenon.
The JavaScript for..in loop is broken. It’s not broken in the scope of what it was designed for, but it’s broken in the way that people expect it to work.
If you’re an engineer at a company where becoming a manager is considered a promotion, then you only have three choices: become a manager yourself, or leave, or resign yourself to being a second‐class employee. It should be obvious — you can work through the math using three sock puppets — that this is an arrangement that pushes a company inexorably towards mediocrity. The best engineers either leave the company or try their hand at management, often with doubly disastrous consequences: they simultaneously lose the company a great engineer and gain them an awful manager.
Dashcode has been rumored to exist for a while, but now we know for certain: it’s being bundled with new MacBooks, and some kind soul sent his copy to Cool OS X Apps. It’s way more robust than I expected. Breakpoints, easy interface building (complete with a library of “ooh shiny” components), a GUI for your widget’s PLIST file, and built‐in localization. This is awesome. I really ought to start working on version 2 of my Azureus widget.
In other huge JavaScript news, FireBug 0.4 is out. This is a huge release, so rather than enumerate the many new features I’ll just tell you to go download it now and find out for yourself. I’ve been beta testing it for a couple weeks and I already can’t imagine going back to 0.3.
Sam Stephenson has a blog, finally. (No, Projectionist doesn’t count.) His first post is monumental: he all but guarantees that Dean Edwards’s Base will be integrated into Prototype, allowing for true inheritance. (I’m guessing this is a 2.0 feature because it’d prompt a rewrite of stuff like the Ajax classes to use the new model. This isn’t something you submit a patch for.)
If you’re using string keys in a JavaScript Array, you’re doing it wrong. But don’t worry — it’s easy to fix.
Brendan Eich: JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web. In a nutshell: a bunch of new syntax, optional type annotation, more keywords borrowed from Java, and a huge lurch in the direction of Python. “Standard global properties (Date, String, etc.) immutable” is listed on the “Bug Fixes” slide; if that means what I think it means, I’m gonna be angry.
This article is Part Two of my unofficial series Putting My Readers to Sleep by Writing 1,000 Words about JavaScript Minutiae.