Posts from — September 2009

Apple published new stats concerning the App Store (press release). The numbers are impressive: two billion apps have been downloaded in just over a year (half a billion this quarter alone) [Read more →]

Inspecting objects at runtime is what’s called “reflection”. Maybe you want to know – at runtime – what methods an object has or what type of object it is. You’ve got a couple of tools at hand to do this in JavaScript: [Read more →]

OpenSocial is becoming more and more popular and if you are thinking about building a social app yourself you should check out our OpenSocial tutorial at Think Vitamin.

JavaScript can be a very dynamic language. To prove this, today we’ll discuss two techniques: dynamic code generation in general and “branching” (a special form). [Read more →]

Actually, I planned to write an article about “Reflow” – an important performance-relevant topic in every highly interactive JavaScript application.
But, as I was doing research for the article, I noticed that there are already a handful of very good articles and resources out there. So, instead of re-describing the wheel, I highly recommend reading through these:

• http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/reflow.html
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/efficient-javascript/?page=3#reflow
• http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css-performance-making-your-javascript-slow/

Maintaining and keeping code clean is always a challenge. And JavaScript is not different here.

In complex applications, JavaScript combines a great deal of application logic with classic GUI concerns. Therefore, temptations are high to put things like labels/texts into code (i.e. hard-coding the values). But already the term “hard-coded” should let you think twice.

[Read more →]