More attempts to explain why people like jQuery -
“The reasons:
- Behavior driven development (BDD)
- MVC + J
- Chaining of actions
- CSS Selector rocks!
- No more checks for presence of an element
- Aids development process”
None of these are reasons I would ever suggest to someone who is choosing a framework. As someone who builds large-scale sites professionally, I view all (except for #6) of these reasons as counter-productive. It is why understanding the gap between professional tools (YUI/Dojo) and hobbyist tools (Prototype/jQuery) is so hard for people on either side of the equation.
Mike Alsup:
“This design pattern has enabled me to create powerful, consistently crafted plugins. I hope it helps you to do the same.”
I hate to say this once again, but jQuery is about syntax, not about programming. This article basically sums that up. It’s a lot of very basic concepts of JavaScript, but using a lot of custom notation. Either way, some of the stuff the guys advocates in this article I quite agree with.
A great run-down of ECMA 4 bug fixes -
John Resig:
“The bug fixes to JavaScript came from a number of places. Generally, however, they have come about due to aspects being under-specified, causing confusion to occur amongst language implementors.”
Project Management Idea from Joel on Scheduling -
Joel Spolsky:
“If you wanted to ship in six months, but you have twelve months on the schedule, you are either going to have to delay shipping, or find some features to delete. You just can’t shrink the blocks, and if you pretend you can, then you are merely depriving yourself of a useful opportunity to actually see into the future by lying to yourself about what you see there.”
Joel knows his project management, and this approach is really neat.
Sanjiv Jivan:
“Overall I’d say that the conference was pretty hard core with little fluff. My biggest criticism is that I don’t feel that there was enough open discussion comparing the obvious contenders and the pro’s and con’s of each. And that not all toolkits were well represented in the little open discussion that they had. The presentations were given in isolation without the hard questions being answered like why Dojo vs. GWT. vs Flex vs Ext vs JQuery vs. Prototype and when each library is the most appropriate to use.”
Overall just well written an a fun read. There’s sort of a messed up bit where he says that The Dojo Toolkit is a framework, but whatever. Can’t win them all.
Sometimes People Write Bad Code -
Jared Spool:
“Like most folks using the web these days, our user had the expectation clicking on the links would bring up a page with more content.”
Nothing special, just a gripe about how bad JavaScript ruins the user experience. This type of stuff is always worth noting.
Joel Spolsky:
“We’ll get a programming language that’s portable and efficient. It will produce code for every web browser, and it will obsess about performance so programmers don’t have to. And they’ll never have to think about web browser incompatibilities ever again.”
I love Joel’s writing about project management, but I can’t recall a single worthwhile article he’s written regarding the actual languages. I think the last one he wrote was about some custom language they wrote. This article gets a lot wrong, mostly because of how out of touch this makes Joel look. For example, many of the current popular frameworks do have a single, cachable, location that can be shared among all pages that use it.
Ben Nadel:
“When I code in jQuery I am overwhelmed with this feeling that things are just falling into place. It’s not like an adrenaline rush or anything - I’m trying to think of how to explain it… it’s like when you think of something really funny to say and you’re just waiting for your turn in the conversation and this feeling of anticipation builds inside of you; it’s like that; it’s like you have this anticipation of greatness.”
I’ve already outlined this attitude before. It’s the same reason that people like ordering drinks at Starbuck’s.
Dion Almaer:
“Neil Roberts has written a piece on Dealing with the Flexibility of JavaScript which delves into functions that are overloaded based on signature.”
I can’t wait for people who haven’t read my article to comment on it!
Leslie Hawthorn:
“We just wrapped up our third Summer of Code, and as with 2006 we invited mentors from all successful organizations to Google for our annual Mentor Summit.”
Let’s play “Where’s Neil”