Introduction
This week has been too busy, so the news will be a bit different. This week we’ll just have a bit of a link dump. I mean that in the nicest, most positive way possible.
Main stories
(Obfuscated JavaScript) JavaScript ( (__ = !$ + $)[+$] + ({} + $)[_/_] +({} + $)[_/_] )
IndexedDB Status [...]
Twitter, onscroll, and performance
You may have noticed Twitter slowing to a crawl earlier this week while trying to scroll down the page. The issue appears to be caused by upgrading to jQuery 1.4.4, as developer Dustin Diaz states on his blog.
John Resig responded with an explanation of the changes in jQuery. In particular, [...]
Chrome ditches H.264
Google released a bombshell this week by dropping support of the H.264 video format. The rationale behind this is Google’s pledge to support open video formats, which is the same philosophy behind Mozilla Firefox and Opera. And yet it’s no coincidence that Google is behind the WebM (VP8) codec, one of [...]
jspp
jspp: JavaScript Pre-Processor is a new node.js package heavily inspired by PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), as the name suggests. This seems like something perfect for frontends most familiar with PHP who are just learning node.js (like me).
jspp runs initialization JavaScript in a PHP-like block: <?jspp.init /* code */ ?>. After the block is closed, [...]
Zombie.js
Zombie.js looks to be a great new JavaScript testing tool for node.js. It creates a headless browser instance and is able to request webpages and run tests against them. It handles unit tests in a familiar way, as well as simulating real user events such as filling in forms and clicking buttons in [...]
Happy holidays, Merry Christmas
This week’s news is a bit late, but it’s packed full of good stuff for you to read over the next week. Have a good time, and go smash some Christmas lights (just virtually, of course).
Apple iAd brings new life to PastryKit
Normally I wouldn’t be so excited about a new technology [...]
ControlJS
ControlJS is a new tool by Steve Souders that’s been introduced over a series of blog posts. Coming from Souders, you know it’s got to be about performance! In particular, ControlJS is for making scripts load faster, which is accomplished by async loading, delayed execution, and overriding document.write (which is often used [...]
Crankshaft for V8
Crankshaft is a new JIT compilation infrastructure for V8, the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome and node.js. It offers very significant speed gains and has increased V8’s performance by 50% on their its own V8 benchmark suite, as well as increase the page load performance by 12% for JavaScript-heavy pages such as [...]
Head.js
Head.js is a sort of mashup of a script loader, a feature detector, and an HTML5 shiv/shim in just over 2kb of JavaScript. It gives the developer different configurations for loading and execution of scripts. For instance, you can load in parallel and execute either in order or in the order they arrive.
There’s [...]
iOS 4.2 brings Accelerometer and WebSockets support
The recently released iOS 4.2 brings some major additions to mobile Safari, including accelerometer and gyroscope support (through the DeviceOrientation API, WebSockets support, and TrueType fonts support.
For acceleration, there’s now a new “ondevicemotion” event to tinker around with. For the gyroscope (for devices that support it), the data [...]
