Me:

“All the security policies that browser enforces remain in effect using this technique. In fact, the only data that gets exchanged between the two sites involved in the transaction is the data that each site explicitly assigns to what is technically nothing more than a shared variable.”

I wrote this article after getting a little frustrated at how complicated authentication schemes are in JavaScript. The library is tiny, and can be used by any site that wants to provide JavaScript access to their API.

David Flanagan:

“Class() — a utility function for defining JavaScript classes.”

Yet another attempt at treating JavaScript as something that it’s not. The comments are worth reading even moreso than the article. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to get away from some of the current attitudes that stand opposed to really great functional programming, and I have some ideas in the works that I hope will help.

Kevin Yank:

“Every major browser has introduced new development tools that make it easier to diagnose problems with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code right inside the browser in question.”

I’m really excited to see some of the stuff coming up in Safari. A good overview for those of you that aren’t experienced with all the options out there.

“I was explaining functions in JS to a friend and got realized that it’s a really great language with its flexibility, closures, anonymous functions, first-class functions etc. Even the stupid idea that you can write a function by calling it an unlimited number of times is simply amazing.”

Fun little challenge

Kevin Yank:

“But here’s where things get interesting: some of the libraries, like jQuery, have added support for a whole bunch of extra selectors on top of those provided by the CSS specs, while others, like Dojo, have stuck to supporting standard CSS selectors only.”

So the article is a pretty average overview of the idea of the forward-looking API. What is so awful about this article are the comments. Most of them are either nit-picking, and many show a complete lack of understanding about the point the author was trying to make. It disappoints me.

Christian Piper:

“After reading A List Apart’s article about if zebra striping (Link) makes any significant impact on speed/accessibility, I thought I would knock a quick demo up of taking zebra striping a step further using the mouseover event of jQuery, to me this appears to speed up scanning of the data.”

I was hoping someone would come up with some ideas after that article. And this is a pretty neat solution. I think something like this, combined with something like Dojo’s FishEyeLite would kick some serious tail.

Barney Boisvert:

“jQuery seems to make you work harder to type less code, while Prototype seems to cost you a few more characters for a bit less density. With the exception of Prototype’s class support, their feature sets are fairly equivalent”

Some great insight into the relative tradeoffs of two different JavaScript libraries. I enjoy to read a post from someone that didn’t drink the Kool-aid when it comes to jQuery who sees the lack of functionality, reliance on third-party libraries, the danger of node-bloom, and the pain of state management as a tradeoff rather than a feature.

Karsten Wagner:

“Bad programmers aren’t able to really understand the problem in all it’s details. Because of this they tend to ‘emulate’ or ‘simulate’ it step by step (for example by looking how a human solves the problems the program should do and than writing a program which does it similar). But simulation isn’t the same as creating a solution based on thorough understanding.”

This is my new go-to resource for explaining the idea of good/bad programmers. It’s a very short, very accurate explanation.

Andrea Giammarchi:

“What we have to do each time is to remember that when we need a private method, with our instance injected scope, we have to write in an unnatural way.”

While Andrea is one of the worst writers on JavaScript I’ve ever read, and his code is almost always wrong in so many ways, he does have some fun ideas.

We use this method he proposes all the time in Dojo to create constructors, yet we haven’t thought to do this with Prototypes. I’m excited to mess around with the possibilities.

Nick Langley:

“For those who want access to a comprehensive and proven Javascript library, Dojo combines a large open source community with the backing of IBM and Sun, among others.”

I’m really impressed by how much this short article gets right. Very little of the commentary on these toolkits actually know the purpose or history of any of them, so this sort of thing is nice.