JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Sometimes programming is just using the right tool. This may be a framework, library or as it happens in my case CSS preprocessor. You probably don't realize it, but LESS or SASS have a lot of constraints. I managed to change that by writing my own CSS preprocessor. I stopped writing CSS and moved everything into the JavaScript world. This article is about AbsurdJS: a small Node.js module, which changed my workflow completely.

If you write a lot of CSS you probably use preprocessor. There are two popular - LESS and SASS. Both tools accept something, which looks like CSS, do some magic and export normal, pure CSS. What I did is just to replace the instrument and the input format. I didn't want to invent a new language or syntax, because this is connected with a lot of things like parsing and compiling. Thankfully, Node.js is here and I decided to use it. Also, I had a lot of LESS type projects, which means that I already use Node.js to compile my styles. It was much easier to replace a module instead of adding something completely new.

However, there is something fundamentally different. The framework can convert JavaScript (or JSON) to valid CSS and HTML. Moreover, when we talk about client-side development, we know that we have to write a lot of CSS and HTML. AbsurdJS gives us the power to write in one language - JavaScript. As we will see in the next sections, we will write everything into JavaScript files. Including the CSS styling.

If you believe in responsive design you probably use a lot of media queries. That's a CSS feature which gives us the power to add something like if statements. We are able to apply rules only if the current page meets certain conditions. In this article I'll show you how I use media queries in JavaScript.

We all know how it works. We type the media query and every rule define in it is applied to the page only if the conditions are valid.