JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

If you have ever tried to write an application that supports multiple languages, I’m sure you will agree that it can be a complicated process. While there are obvious issues, such as translating the text, there are also differing conventions between countries on how things like dates and numbers are formatted, or how letters are sorted. Even just between the different versions of English, there are issues that crop up, such as how being British, I may understand the date 10/07/2013 differently than my American colleagues.

It is these latter cases that the ECMAScript Internationalization APIaims to address. It is a companion spec to ES5.1 and above, that adds language sensitive functionality to JavaScript. It is influenced by established internationalisation APIs in Java and .NET.

The three areas that the current version one of the spec handles are strings, numbers, and dates. It does this by making a number of existing methods of the String, Number, and Date objects locale aware (that is, you can pass in a locale as an argument), and providing anIntl object that provides further localisation functionality.

Personally, I don’t actually care all that much about the whole promises/callbacks/coroutines/generators debate. It’s provably trivial to turn any callback-taking API into a promise-returning API or generator-yielding API or vice-versa.

I’m of the opinion that breaking functionality into small enough chunks that your boilerplate doesn’t matter is much more important than which boilerplate you decide tastes the yummiest. In JavaScript, we have first-class language support for passing functions around, so I tend to use callbacks, simply because it requires no extra “stuff”.

What’s important to me is that an API be useful, performant, and easy to reason about. When I’m writing JavaScript, I care a lot about how V8 is going to optimize it, and so try to choose patterns that it can optimize nicely. As of today, generators just aren’t first-class enough, and Promises require an extra abstraction. That may change someday, but these principles probably will not.

Imagine being able to show the data of the webcam of an user by using this simple HTML tag:

Well, now you can!
Take a look at some demos and download it and see for yourself.

It is a module for angularjs that consists of only one directive, webcam.
It gives you a new element tag that can be used to access the user camera on browsers that implement the getUserMedia specification.

For many years, the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) has been one of the most used means of making nodes talk to each other. In RPC there are two intervenients: the server, which hosts a series of procedures, and a client, which calls these procedures. In most RPC implementations, the client calls these procedures as if it was doing local calls, making the code look natural.

In Node.js with the browser you can use this module named rpc-stream to create a RPC channel between a server and a client. You can also make two of these channels on top of a duplex channel (like a sock.js websocket stream) to make the calls bi-directional: not only can the browser invoke procedures on the server, the server can also invoke procedures on the client by its own initiative.

In this post, we’re going to take the To-do application example we built in the previous post and modify it so that it uses an RPC Stream instead of an Event Stream.

Hungry for some file templates to get you started in the morning? Well now you can fill up on a set of web template packs for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. SideWaffle is an open source project that creates a Visual Studio extension containing a set of file templates you can use for web projects.
SideWaffle currently has several templates including 10 I contributed for Angular, Durandal, and creating a JavaScript IIFE. One of the best parts is that SideWaffle will be frequently updated with new and useful templates (they do check for high quality templates). I expect that in the near term we’ll see a lot of additions.
* Angular Controller (using Controller As syntax)
* Angular Controller (using $scope)
* Angular Directive (creates a skeleton for a directive)
* Angular Factory (great for data, logging, and other services)
* Angular Module (sets up a module)
* Durandal ViewModel
* Durandal Service
* Durandal main.js (common creation syntax for kicking off Durandal)
* JavaScript IIFE (Basic IIFE using vanilla.js)
I use the Angular templates in my upcoming course at Pluralsight on using Angular and Breeze to build a powerful SPA.

What we're going to do is create a promises/A+ implementation based on http://promises-aplus.github.io/promises-spec/. By doing this hopefully we'll get a deeper understanding of just how promises work.

according to the terminology a value can be anything including undefined and a reason is any value that indicates why a promise was rejected. That last definition is a little blurry - can "undefined" indicate why something was rejected? I'm going to say no and only accept non-null values. If anything doesn't work then I'll throw an error.

Meteor is awesome, i loved it immediately as i saw the video. The way you can build one page apps is absolutely intuitive. I struggled with Ember.js, Backbone.js and AngularJS (which clutter the HTML too much), but Meteor really got it, in my opinion.

The problem with Meteor is that it forces you to use the full-stack. Natively there is currently no easy way to separate the frontend from the server in Meteor.

As i’m using Meteor to build the awesome TunedIn WebApp and we have already an existing API, i was in the need to split Meteor. Out of any need comes a solution so i wrote a grunt script which takes care of this automatically.

EventedMind is a place dedicated to learning. Sometimes I'm learning the material along with you, and sharing as I go. Other times, I'm teaching from experience. And sometimes, I'm learning and teaching by experimenting with or creating new projects. In the future, I hope to cover projects and Meteor packages that other people have created as well.

Meteor is at the forefront of a new wave of frameworks that make building web apps easier, simpler, and faster.

Not only is Meteor entirely real-time (meaning any change to your database is automatically reflected live in the browser), but the fact that it uses JavaScript on both the client and servermeans that you won't have to juggle with multiple languages and environments anymore.

No matter your programming experience, by following our step-by-step instructions you'll be able to get your own Meteor app up and running in a matter of days!

What we are building in this tutorial is a real-time social news app, complete with posting, voting and commenting.

A talk on using Backbone to structure your JavaScript code within WordPress themes and plugins, delivered at WordCamp Chicago in June 2013

JavaScript’s implementation of scope and context is a unique feature of the language, in part because it is so flexible. Functions can be adopted for various contexts and scope can be encapsulated and preserved. These concepts are behind some of the most powerful design patterns JavaScript has to offer. However, this is also a tremendous source of confusion amongst developers, and for good reason. The following is a comprehensive explanation of scope and context in JavaScript, the difference between them, and how various design patterns make use of them.

Similar to JSDoc and YUIDoc, Docular provides documentation generation. Docular and the grunt-docular plugin leverage the AngularJS documentation generation implementation.

performs documentation generation based on AngularJS's documentation generation implementation.

Docular will parse, manipulate, and render documentation embedded within yoru script files or within standlone non-script fiels. The documentation can be viewed within a webapp through NodeJS or can be moved to the root of an apache server.

angular-cache is a very useful replacement for Angular's $cacheFactory.

angular-cache is a caching system that improves upon the capabilities of the $cacheFactory provided by AngularJS. Check out the demo for a quick introduction, or continue on down for more detailed information.

The goal of the project is to solve a general problem, not satisfy a specific scenario.