AJAX and JavaScript continued

I’ve ran across this great AJAX presentation. It’s got tons of interesting info. Authors advocating that JavaScript is not all that bad and provide a good list of resources for dealing with it. Dion and Ban are running http://www.ajaxian.com/ and below are a few useful links from their AJAX presentation. Few interesting pointters from presentation:

• AjaxFaces (http://www.ajaxfaces.com)
• GoogleMaps is using IFRAME to solve “back button problem”
• DWR: Direct Web Remoting
• JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
• Think XML-RPC but with JSON instead of XML !!!
• Flash is AJAX with ActionScript insetad of JavaScript

UI Toolkit

JavaScript Widgets have been around for a long time:

• ActiveWidgets
(http://www.activewidgets.co
m/grid/)
• Backbase
(http://www.backbase.com)
• SmartClient
(http://www.smartclient.com)
• Dojo (again)
(http://dojotoolkit.org)

JavaScript Utilities
There are many tools that you need to make life bearable in JavaScript
land:
• JavaScript Munging
Jazmin / JavaScript Minifier (http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html)
Obfuscator (http://www.shaneng.bobos.ca/#jso_description)
• Debugging
Ajax Debugging Tool (http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000252.html)
IE Leak Detector (http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000252.html)
DOM Inspector (built into Mozilla, need to grab IE plugins)
TrimBreakpoint (http://trimpath.com/project/wiki/TrimBreakpoint)
• XML Munging
Google AJAXSLT (http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net)
JSXML (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsxml)
E4X
• Misc
JSDoc (http://jsdoc.sourceforge.net/)
JsLint (http://www.crockford.com/javascript/lint.html)
• Unit Testing
JsUnit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsunit)
Selenium (http://selenium.thoughtworks.com)

JavaScript Survival Tips
You will miss your IDE(A)
• Code completion etc
Packaging as source only
• GoogleBrowser will offer a binary version? ☺
Debugging: tougher
• Use debugging tools in Firefox / MS debugger
• Watch out for misspelling variable names
Packaging of libraries
• Leads to hacking and many foo.js ‘libraries’
• Be wary of namespace
innerHTML property will well-form any bad HTML
JavaScript Limitations: Signing Code
Limitation: “Can’t request other resources on
the web”
• WRONG: You can, as long as you sign your code
• Mozilla is anal about this security
• IE? Not so much ☺
Limitation: “But I want to read from the file
system!”
• WRONG: You can, as long as you sign your code
Limitation: “But I want to write to the file
system!”
• WRONG: You can, as long as you sign your code