Software As She’s Developed

Summary: Avoid $$(".classname") on large DOMs!!! I've recently been optimising the guts out of a JS webapp I wrote, which was making IE crawl to a halt. I discovered this after introducing a stress-inducing data set. (Using Rails' fixtures makes light work of this; since the fixtures are Ruby templates just like the web templates, it's [...]

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This is the fourth and final podcast in the series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). This 54-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 17, pp 473-530): Lazy Registration Direct Login Host-Proof Hosting Timeout Heartbeat Unique URLs Dynamic Favicons Dedicated to the Nitobians, whose last podcast inspired me to crank another one out again. Recent events [...]

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I'm constantly amazed at the amount of documentation people are inclined to create without including a single example. Man pages that devote pages worth of command-line options, flags, grammar, caveats, historical anecdotes, and NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE. Textbooks that devote pages to a particular API, then expose it all in one monolithic program. Countless reference documentation on HTML [...]

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Ajax Design Patterns is Book of the Month in this month's .Net mag (p.23, Issue 155, October, 2006). Incidentally, the mag is about the 'Net, not specifically MS .Net (which it pre-dates). The review says: So AJAX might be the hottest thing in programming since, er, ordinary Javascript, but it's no good just learning how to [...]

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GigaOM discusses "How Odeo Screwed Up". Odeo is a service I want to like. I promoted it to others when it came out and I frequently use it as an example of the Richer Plugin pattern as it uses an effective combination of Flash and Ajax. However, I had to stop using Odeo six months ago, [...]

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Coding Horror mentions Applescript's well-intentioned attempt to feel like English. Quoting John Gruber The idea was, and I suppose still is, that AppleScript’s English-like facade frees you from worrying about computer-science-y jargon like classes and objects and properties and commands, and allows you to just say what you mean and have it just work. But saying what [...]

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