JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Monads: they're incredibly useful, and also maybe a little intimidating. Beginner functional programmers often cringe when they hear the term. JavaScript legend Douglas Crockford once said that monads are cursed – that once you understand monads for yourself you lose the ability to explain them to others. In the programming language F#, monads are called “computational expressions” mostly so people aren’t scared away.

But I think all this fear and mysticism around the dreaded “M-word” need not be so. So in this post, I’m going to attempt to put a small crack in the curse, not by attempting to explain all of monad theory in general, but instead by thoroughly diving into a concrete example of a monad in a specific language: the Maybe monad in JavaScript[1].

If you’ve been putting off learning about monads – or maybe have never even heard of them until now – then this post is for you. It will provide just enough material to give you a sense of what monads are and what they can do. From there you should have a solid stepping off point from which you can jump into reading something like this without trepidation.

A tiny JavaScript framework that respects the separation of content, presentation and logic.

Like a lot of developers, I feel guilty sending a huge JavaScript payload to the user just to have a collapsable list somewhere on the website. jQuery is one hell of a framework and I always loved using it, but 9 out of 10 websites I used it for didn’t even use 10% of what jQuery is capable of. Users are loading the other 90% of jQuery for no good reason.

I needed to make it up to the internet and so I wrote Crumbl. Crumbl has all the methods I needed in those 9 out of 10 websites and was written with two big ideas in mind:

1. It had to follow jQuery’s way of writing JavaScript to make the transition for developers accustomed to jQuery as smooth as possible. This means, using the dollar sign notation to invoke Crumbl, using the same name and syntax for most methods and being able to chain functions together for fast coding.

2. It could only contain JavaScript-exclusive functionality. CSS methods, animation methods and the like have all been left out: predefined CSS classes and CSS3 animations can fully replace them.

The result is a nice, lightweight JavaScript base for your average website. Great to support all your simple website scripting like modal pop-ups, tabs, lightboxes, showcases and responsive navigations.

JavaScript used to be confined to the browser. But these days, it’s becoming increasingly popular in server-side applications in the form of Node.js. Node.js provides event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that supposedly makes it easy to build scalable network application. In this talk you will learn about the consequences of combining the event-driven programming model with a prototype-based, weakly typed, dynamic language. We will share our perspective as a server-side Java developer who wasn’t entirely happy about JavaScript in the browser, let alone on the server. You will learn how to use Node.js effectively in modern, polyglot applications.

For those who haven’t heard of Meteor yet: it is a hip new Javascript platform for developing web apps. It’s quite an innovation compared to “traditional” web frameworks: you develop in a single codebase and the code almost magically works in both the browser and the server. The platform also synchronizes data automatically across all connected clients by using long polling, WebSockets etc. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Whatever the result will be, the Phusion Passenger application server will be around to help you simplify your deployments and keeping your systems running smoothly.

Phusion Passenger takes a lot of complexity out of deploying Meteor, and adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production. It also makes it administering Meteor apps much easier. It has already done this for Ruby, Python and Node.js and is being used by high-profile companies such as Apple, Pixar, New York Times, AirBnB, Juniper etc.

Here are some of the benefits that Phusion Passenger gives you...

We created the HTML5 Mobile Challenge to put perceptions about HTML5 and mobile to the test. Not just a blanket generalization, but a hands on experiment so we could start with the raw senses and move up to the truth. We gave savvy developers two seemingly identical applications, and asked them to advise us on which one was native, and which one was a hybrid application running in a browser.

The proof is in the video. Once you tell someone that an app is native or hybrid, they make immediate assumptions about it based on their perceptions. Even when there is no native application at all.

In order to be able to challenge perceptions, we first had to find out if the rumors about HTML5 were true. Could we build a mobile app with HTML5 that was indistinguishable from native? We've heard a lot about how it couldn't be done, so we decided to find out for ourselves.

Over the last few months, we put our money where our mouth was - on HTML5. We sat down, designed an app, and began to build it using our own tools and the HTML5 platform. The result was a demo app called “Cuteness”.

Cuteness is a Reddit reader (so named because it only allows you to read the 'aww’' subreddit) which aims to take a hard look at some of the most tenuous areas of the mobile web.

* Ember Table: allows you to render very large data sets by only rendering the rows that are being displayed.
It is written as an ember component with an API that is easy to understand and extend.

* Ember Widgets: a component library which includes easy to extend components such as select, popover, modal, carousel, and accordion. This library is built on bootstrap 3.0 CSS and represents our ideas about component best practices.

* Ember Charts: a charting library built with d3.js framework. It includes time series, bar, pie, and scatter charts which are easy to extend and modify. The out-of-the-box behavior these chart components represents our thoughts on best practices in chart interactivity and presentation.

The Chrome web browser is Google’s custom browser. Not only is it incredibly speedy and on the bleeding edge of web development, it is at the forefront of delivering web experiences both on and off the web.

Chrome Apps are embedded applications that run within the web browser, but are intended on delivering a native app feel. Since they run within Chrome itself, they are written in HTML5, javascript, CSS3, and have access to native-like capabilities that true web applications do not.

Chrome apps have access to the Chrome API and services and can provide a integrated desktop-like experiences to the user.

One more interesting differentiation between Chrome apps and webapps is that they always load locally, so they show up immediately, rather than waiting for the network to fully download the components. This greatly improves the performance and our user’s experience with running our apps.

In this article, we’ll walk through how to create an advanced Chrome application using Angular.

In this guest blog post by Andy Shora you will learn about Unit and Integration Testing Best Practices in AngularJS. What should you be testing and when should you be writing tests? Read more!

A single-page application architecture promised to unlock the backend’s blazing performance, so we began searching for an appropriate framework, and identified AngularJS as a promising candidate. Following the “fail fast” principle, we began with our toughest challenge, the log view.

This is a real acid test for an application framework. The user can click on any word to search for related log messages, so there may be thousands of clickable elements on the page; yet we want instantaneous response for paging through the log. We were already prefetching the next page of log data, so the user interface update was the bottleneck. A straightforward AngularJS implementation of the log view took 1.2 seconds to advance to the next page, but with some careful optimizations we were able to reduce that to 35 milliseconds. These optimizations proved to be useful in other parts of the application, and fit in well with the AngularJS philosophy, though we had to break few rules to implement them. In this article, we’ll discuss the techniques we used.

A headless Internet Explorer browser using the .NET WebBrowser Class with a Javascript API running on the V8 JavaScript engine.

The API is coded as a port of PhantomJS. Basically, if you have used phantom before then you already know how to use TrifleJS.