Hello world!

My name is David Calhoun, a frontend engineer at Yahoo! and until relatively recently I worked with Matt Henry on Yahoo! Mobile. Matt has been pretty busy lately, so he’s offered to give me the task of maintaining the blog’s News Roundup and the PDF edition’s Community News. I hope I can live up to the role! I have a passion for all topics frontend (HTML, CSS, JS, etc) in general, but I’ll try my best to keep this to JavaScript-only topics. If I ever miss anything particularly important (let’s hope not!), always feel free to leave a reply below.

Jo HTML5 Mobile App Framework

Jo is a new mobile UI framework by Dave Balmer which weighs in just over 8k and aims to provide a consistent experience across webOS, iOS, Android, and Symbian devices. Yes, all WebKit-based browsers on smartphones. But even these phones have their own inconsistencies, and Jo aims to iron out these differences and provide an abstraction layer for things such as gestures and client storage.

This is all well and good, but if you peek into the documentation there’s a few more things Jo offers. One of the most controversial things Jo does is use custom nonstandard HTML tags, taking advantage of the fact that these browsers will still allow the element to be styled. Instead of having a “horde of divs” with classes on them, now there’s a horde of nonstandard tags such as jodialog and jobutton. Interesting but definitely controversial.

shoulda.js

Shoulda.js is a micro JavaScript testing framework built by Phil Crosby and inspired by Shoulda for Ruby. And when I say micro, I mean micro, as the entire code is under 300 lines.

Unit tests are arranged into modular “contexts” and has the familiar setup/teardown and assert functions common to most unit testing frameworks. The tests are run with V8 on the command line and don’t run in an actual browser, so shoulda.js falls somewhere between a JS lint tool and a full unit testing framework that tests in-browser.

Kraken: Mozilla’s new testing benchmark

A few weeks back, Mozilla released Kraken, a new browser benchmark designed to be Mozilla’s analogue to SunSpider and the V8 Benchmark Suite.

“We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward” says Mozilla developer Rob Sayre. “These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today.” In other words, Kraken is testing some of the weak points that are holding developers back.

And it looks like progress on that front is definitely being made, as Kraken shows a 2.5x speed increase in Firefox 4 over Firefox 3.6.

I tried running Kraken on my iPhone 3GS but the script timed out, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the test to run. I also ran it on the Nexus One and the test seemed to progress, albeit quite slowly. Hopefully the test will be more compatible with mobile devices in the future, especially given Mozilla’s interest and ongoing development with Firefox Mobile.