Express-asset, Jquery-droploader and Chattan–three awesome new projects I just open-sourced.
Blog Archives
An eventful week…
It’s been an interesting week so far. I had a job interview at Yammer in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, so I was to fly out from Kelowna on Monday.
A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.
There is a major feature of Javascript that is sorely misunderstood–the “new” keyword. Using the “new” keyword when declaring a variable will assign it’s value to the state of “this” upon completion of the function. Not using “new” will simply assign it’s value to the return value, or ‘undefined’ if nothing was returned. I wrote a simple example below to illustrate the effects of using the new keyword.
Peint Update!
At last, Peint is usable enough to be called “beta” software. I was working on other things for awhile so it took a bit of time to get back to it. I’ve made many changes including; – Moved module system parts into a separate Utils library, which can easily attach the module system to any [...]
Let’s chat about node.js
Last night I had the pleasure of presenting on node.js at the November OKDG meet. It was a lot of fun, and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in the technology. Well, now I’ve got the slideshow available in PDF form for all to see. 
Not only that, the chat demo created in the presentation will remain live for all to play with. In addition to what was covered in the presentation, it also has a basic message filtering system to convert URLs to embedded content. Try posting a URL to an image, Youtube video or PDF and you can see it in action. Check it out!
Peint – Event-based canvas drawing, yay!
I did a bunch of work on Peint today, refactoring it to something that I might actually consider good enough to release. On that note; Peint enters alpha as of now!
Peint – Painting to canvas made easy!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been working on a graphics rendering library for the html5 canvas element. Peint is an attempt to make using canvas easier and more flexible, while introducing event-based programming. You include only core library and then use Peint.require(‘yourscript’, callback) to asynchronously load extra modules and execute the callback code once the module is ready. Using this method, http requests are made smaller and occur after page load, so execution appears near instant–no waiting for 100+ kb of code to download before the system starts setting itself up.
On canvas, and how to use it well.
All day I have been working on a graphics library for html5′s canvas element, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not particularly easy to use “as-is” in more involved applications.
Node.js – I’m a fanboy already.
About a week ago I discovered a unique new programming technology called node.js. It’s an event-driven javascript system running on Google’s V8 engine and is primarily focused on functioning as a web server. I hesitate to call it a web server however–it’s much more than that!
jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.
If you downloaded v1.3 of jquery.flash I would recommend switching to this one. There has been no functionality changes, so it should just be drop-in. It fixes a minor bug I added when I switched to using indexOf() for iterating through attributes and parameters…apparently IE doesn’t support it. >.>