CategoryJavaScript

February 3, 2016 — There have been some amazing quantum leaps in JavaScript tooling which have made it possible for you to dive head first into writing fully ES6 modules, without compromising on the essentials like testing, linting and (most importantly) the ability for others to easily consume what we write. In this article, Jim Cowart is going to focus on how to create a JavaScript package written in ES6 that’s usable in a site or app regardless of whether you’re using CommonJS, asynchronous module definition (AMD) or plain browser global modules. Read more…

February 2, 2016 — Service workers do a lot of different things; there are myriad ways to harness their powers. In this article, Lyza Danger Gardner explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle. She decided to build a simple service worker for her website that roughly mirrors the features (provide a customized offline fallback experience, make the website function offline, and increase online performance by reducing network requests for certain assets) that the obsolete Application Cache API used to provide. Read more…

January 19, 2016 — JavaScript developers faced a great revolution with Node.js, by allowing them to write code that runs directly on their machines. They started to easily write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in their development cycles. npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving them quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which they install on their machines to access from wherever they are in their system. Make the most out of it Installing packages from npm globally. Read more…

January 7, 2016 — Ember is a JavaScript web framework focused on building ambitious, rich client web applications. Technologically, Ember has positioned itself as the antidote to hype fatigue. It’s a framework that just won’t die, but keeps pressing on with each innovation and with a commitment to backwards–compatibility. If you’ve been waiting to give Ember a try, why not start today with Ember CLI? It provides a productive and feature–rich development experience. All you need to get started and create an Ember App using Ember CLI is right here below. Read more…

December 28, 2015 — In this article, Ilya Zayats will show you that, from React’s perspective, there is no difference at all in what to render. React helps to organize an application into small, human-digestible chunks. You can avoid any complex internal interactions between small components, while your application continues to be blazingly fast due to the DOM-diffing that React does under the hood. Trying to grasp what’s wrong with a graph or visualization just by looking at SVG generator templates is often overwhelming, and attempts to maintain internal structure or separation of concerns are often complex and tedious. So, can we apply the same techniques to web graphics — SVG in particular? Yes! Read more…

December 21, 2015 — Single-page applications tend to take the form of runtimes, JavaScript executables deployed like popup shops into vacant  elements. In this article, Heydon Pickering will introduce a solution for architecting progressive single-page applications using little more than a couple of CSS tricks, less than 0.5 KB of JavaScript and, importantly, some static HTML. It is not a perfect or complete solution, but it testifies to the notion that performant, robust and indexable single-page applications are achievable: You can embrace web standards while reaping the benefits of sharing data and functionality between different interface screens on a single web page. Read more…

December 12, 2015 — Rodney Rehm understood that ARIA could help him write web applications without having to bike-shed class names for various states. You can care about accessibility issues without being affected by a disability yourself. In many ways, making your apps and sites accessible benefits everyone. ally.js helps you accomplish that. ally.js is positioning itself as a center for collaborating on accessibility-related features, by providing low-level tools to other libraries and frameworks as well as high-level functions to developers. If you start working together you might just get somewhere! Read more…

December 9, 2015 — Today, join Cory Shaw while he reflects on some of the mistakes he and his team made, the tools they used, the workflows and guidelines they followed, and even some of the custom tools they built while working on the new Hawaiian Airlines website. All while growing a UI development team from one to over ten people to get the job done. It was a rollercoaster ride like no other, but they have prevailed and built what he believes to be one of the best airline-booking experiences on the web. This article and the information herein has been shared with the explicit permission and generosity of Hawaiian Airlines. Read more…

November 24, 2015 — In this introductory article, Slava Fomin II will show you the most important parts of the Sails framework and give you some specific examples to get you going. Of course, if you want to use it in your daily work, you will have to spend some time mastering it and taking it to the next level. The good news is that Sails comes with pretty solid documentation and an active community. The creator of Sales even answers questions on StackOverflow personally. He’ll neither confirm nor deny that Sails is being developed by a giant smart octopus, but he will do his best to guide you from the humble ensign to being the confident captain of your own ship! You will not be alone. Read more…

November 19, 2015 — A lot of game genres, such as racing and platform fighting games, rely on a gamepad rather than a keyboard and mouse for the best experience. This means these games can now be played on the web with the same gamepads that are used for consoles. A demo is available, and if you don’t have a gamepad, you can still enjoy the demo using a keyboard. As with all experimental technologies, results with the Gamepad API are unstable. However, by using it (and providing feedback), you are sculpting the future of the technology. This represents a huge opportunity for the game industry! Read more…