Posts tagged: JAVASCRIPT

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis. Then, while I was mulling this over, a neato Javascript library demo I was running crashed Safari, taking my post with it.

Lesson 1: I will remember to always use “Edit in TextMate” in the future.

Lesson 2: I won’t get too excited about cramming my pages full of Javascript.

In recent weeks I’ve been listening to the back-catalog of Ajaxian podcasts while commuting. It’s been great food for thought for me, since I’m one of those people who retreated to the server side years ago to avoid the horror of incompatible, standards-oblivious browsers and crazed animated status bar messages. Things seem to have gotten a lot better, to say the least.

Here are some things that these podcasts have prompted me to think about:

I’ve been enjoying listening to the “Audible Ajax” podcasts from Ajaxian lately. One of the older shows was a talk by Lugradio’s Stuart Langridge in which, in an aside, he mentioned a table sorting widget he had written. It sounded cool. When I got home I fired up the browser and found it: sorttable.js.

Even though it’s over two years old and doubtless there are a bazillion Ajax (tm) toolkits that include supersets of this functionality, I find it to be a very elegant thing. Largely that’s because of its utterly configuration-free operation. As long has you’ve put <th> headers on your table, you just include the script in your page, and set class="sortable" and a unique id on each of your table(s); clicking on a table header re-sorts the table by that column, without any action on the server side at all.

I won’t ask “why?” because I think it’s kind of neat – TrimPath Junction is an unabashed Javascript clone of Ruby on Rails that was released earlier this year. Requires a Javascript interpreter on your server of course. (For bonus points run it on a Javascript web server too.)

I have to admit that until looking at the Junction example code I had never realized that though Javascript has objects, it has no classes. That sent me off reading more about prototype-oriented languages (that Lua just keeps popping up).

Via Rafe I learned of an astounding Javascript hack done by a MySpace user. Excerpts from the summary, allegedly written by the creator:

…anyone who viewed my profile who wasn’t already on my friends list would inadvertently add me as a friend. Without their permission.

8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests. Woah. I did not expect this much. I’m surprised it even worked. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I’ll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.