John Resig post the new article in which he tell about the next version of the ECMAScript and new project called ECMAScript Harmony. He writes:

«There's been some turmoil in the world of ECMAScript.

While many are - even, at least, vaguely - familiar with the development of ECMAScript 4 the devil is in the details. I've blogged about ES4 extensively in the past - and even did a speaking tour last fall educating developers about its details and implementations, however, a lot has happened since that time.

The ECMAScript 4 specification development was very ad-hoc in nature (primarily tackled by Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google): Implementors agreed upon a set of features that they wished to implement and a specification was molded out of the remaining consensus. Building a specification tailored by implementation is a very pragmatic means of reaching a reasonable result.

However there was a fundamental split related to how much of the specification should be implemented. Enter ECMAScript 3.1. This working group (lead by Microsoft and Yahoo) set out to implement some minor changes and bug fixes to ECMAScript 3 while remaining as a subset of full ECMAScript 4 functionality.»

Source: John Resig blog.

John Resig tells about trackin Firebug performance in his blog. He writes:

«Firebug 1.2 final is set to be released sometime within the next week or two which means that our goals for Firebug 1.3 need to be pretty clear at this point. Last week the Firebug Working Group convened at Google to discuss the goals for the upcoming release. In taking a step back and looking at what was most important one thing was quite obvious: The stability and performance of Firebug needs to be improved.

Unfortunately we're in a very difficult situation. There are, approximately, three developers who've done any sort of serious bug fixing on the internals of Firebug. One is John J. Barton (of IBM - primarily responsible for the 1.1 and 1.2 release of Firebug) and the other is Jan Odvarko (of Mozilla - part of the new Firebug team). Unfortunately the primary source of information lies in Joe Hewitt (the original creator of Firebug), who is quite incommunicado these days.»

Source: John Resig blog.

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library.

Raphaël uses SVG and VML as a base for graphics creation. Because of that every created object is a DOM object so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify objects later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing cross-browser and easy. Currently library supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

Source: Raphael.

Lisha Sterling post an article in which he compares the animations created on the JavaScript and Flash. She writes:

«When you think of interactive multimedia on the Web, you probably think of Flash. Flash offers the webmaster a single platform to create content that will be seen by the majority of Web site users, and that everyone who sees Flash will be able to interact with it in exactly the same way. However, there are some arguments against Flash, and many webmasters choose to use Flash in only limited pockets within their site. What many people don't realize is that you can create similar experiences in JavaScript, and by doing so you can avoid many of the problems inherent in Flash»

Source: Webreference.com.

There is an intresting collection of libnks on various tools and article which can be useful when developing on JavaScript for Internet Explorer. Here's the excerpt from preface article:

«The level of pain experienced when doing web development in internet explorer can range from 'kicking oneself in the balls' to 'swearing profusely', all depending on the tools used.
When googling for best ways to debug javascript i found that there are plenty of articles out there about it, but most are old, and some that give bad advice. »

Source: Note To Dogself.

The authors of the Mind Tree site post a collection of the most intresting and useful tutorials about MooTools library. Here's small excerpt from the preface to this collection:

«There are literally over a hundred of JavaScript frameworks out there that make writing complex client-side code significantly easier. If you’re in the market for a powerful, relatively lightweight, and customizable JavaScript framework, MooTools is worth checking out.

To help you get on your way to developing highly-interactive web applications using MooTools, here’s 20 tutorials and working examples that’s worth a read.»

Source: Mind Tree.

David Walsh post an intresting article in which he show how create script that can help you to protect the images on your site. He writes:

«Image protection is a hot topic on the net these days, and why shouldn't it be? If you spent two hours designing an awesome graphic, would you want it ripped of in matter of seconds? Hell no! That's why I've created an image protector class to help designers and artists protect their images. Here's how it helps:

• Prevents right-click "Save Image As".

• Prevents dragging an image to the desktop.

• Prevents right-click "Save Background As".

• Prevents right-click "View Background Image"

»

Source:David Walsh blog.

One more intresting tutorial about creating sliding panels in JavaScript posted on the Switch On the Code site. Here's small excerpt from this article:

«We've written several different tutorials about sliding panels, and each time we get requests for different features and functionality. The first feature I addressed was starting the panels in an up position and having them slide down. Lately we've been getting comments about how to put the panels inline with the rest of the content. That is, when the panel expands or contracts, the rest of the page moves with them. That's what this tutorial will address today.

ust like with the other sliding panel tutorials, I'll be using version 2 of our generic animation code. You'll find using the generic animation code greatly reduces the complexity of creating sliding panels. You can download the generic animation javascript file here.»

Source: Switch On the Code.

Jared Rhizor post an intrestring tutorial about creating spectaacular photo gallery with MooTools.

He writes:

«Before starting, take a look at the demo. It will be easier to understand the purpose of each step if you know the goal. First, create a simple HTML file, and add a link to the stylesheet (main.css) and to two JavaScript files (mootools.js and main.js). Create those files in the same directory. Then go to the MooTools Core Builder. Select all of the components and then click Download. This will download mootools-1.2-core.js. Copy the contents of that file to the mootools.js file. Then got to the MooTools More Builder and select all of the components and click Download. Copy the contents again and paste them at the bottom of mootools.js. (Note: Most sites, including this photo gallery, do not need all of the components. However, using all of them at the beginning, and then cutting out the ones you don't need make development a lot easier. If you were in the middle of a project and realized you wanted a different featured included in one of the components you didn't download, you would have to download it again before continuing. This way, you only have to download it again after you are finished.)»

Source: Nettuts.

One more old game ported to JavaScript bby Jacob Seidlin. He writes:

«A short Super Mario inspired game in just 20 lines of JavaScript code.

The good inmates over at the Ozone Asylum have a monthly JavaScript contest where the goal is to create something interesting in just 20 lines of "effective" code, each month having its own theme. I've been following it for a while and since this month's theme was "Your favourite video game", I figured it was about time I submitted something. You may or may not know that I have a certain affection for both JavaScript game development and Super Mario, so I saw this as a chance to go back, start from scratch and have another go at getting some JavaScript Mario action. However, rather than attempting a remake of the original SMB, this is a bit different. Each single-screen level has two pipes, start and finish. Before exiting you must bonk all the [?]-boxes, collect the coins they spit out and stomp all the Goombas. There are 6 levels after which you just get to play the same levels again.»

Source: Nihillogic.

• Version 0.30 Change Log:

• Rendering speed increased significantly in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

• Required CSS styles have lessened dramatically.

• rowSpan and colSpan support added.

• onStart option added. onStart is a function run before the superTable script begins to re-render the table. Any this.variableNameHere variables you create here can be used later ( eg. onFinish function )

• Fixed various minor bugs.

Source:SuperTables.

TestCase is a light and friendly testing framework for JavaScript code. It is written in pure JavaScript and works with all the modern web-browsers.

TestCase offers full stack test-environment. You can write usual unit-tests, you can test your web-pages structures, styles and functionality. We have lots of nice and usefull tools you was dreaming about.

The new version has the following features:

• Updated the ajax-mocking feature, now it works everywhere

• Updated the styles-assertions, now they understand the css-level styles

• The mocking interface revision

• Various small fixes and updates

Source: TestCase.

Andrew Tetlaw post a new article about event delegation in JavaScript. He write:

«If you’re into adding a little JavaScript interactivity to your web pages you may have heard of JavaScript event delegation and thought it was one of those convoluted design patterns only hardcore JavaScript programmers worry about. The truth is, if you already know how to add JavaScript event handlers, it’s a snap to implement.

JavaScript events are the bedrock of all interactivity on web pages (I mean serious interactivity, not those dinky CSS drop-down menus). In traditional event handling you add or remove event handlers from each element as needed. However, event handlers can potentially cause of memory leaks and performance degradation — the more you have, the greater the risk. JavaScript event delegation is a simple technique by which you add a single event handler to a parent element in order to avoid having to add event handlers to multiple child elements»

Source:SitePoint.

Stoyan Stefanov post an article in which he tells about non-blocking loading JavaScript source files. He writes:

«Let’s first take a look at what the problem is with the script downloads. The thing is that before fully downloading and parsing a script, the browser can’t tell what’s in it. It may contain document.write() calls which modify the DOM tree or it may even contain location.href and send the user to a whole new page. If that happens, any components downloaded from the previous page may never be needed. In order to avoid potentially useless downloads, browsers first download, parse and execute each script before moving on with the queue of other components waiting to be downloaded. As a result, any script on your page blocks the download process and that has a negative impact on your page loading speed.

Here’s how the timeline looks like when downloading a slow JavaScript file (exaggerated to take 1 second). The script download (the third row in the image) blocks the two-by-two parallel downloads of the images that follow after the script:»

You can read more at the YUI Blog.

Edmond Begoli post an article about jQuery Javascript Library. This article covers the following topics:

• Introduction

• Installing jQuery

• CSS and DOM Manipulation

• jQuery in Action