The If Works

JS.Class and Helium updates

James Coglan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:57:44 +0000

Just a quickie to let you know I’ve pushed out new minor releases of JS.Class and Helium tonight. The updates in JS.Class 2.1.4 center around a totally rewritten package manager that uses an event cycle to trigger dependency downloads instead of polling packages to find out when they’re ready to load; this should make a [...]

Faye gets server-side clients

James Coglan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:20:47 +0000

After its initial release a few weeks ago, the number one feature requested for Faye has been server-side clients. The first version let JavaScript running in the browser send messages, but now you can create a client on the server side to let your backend applications subscribe and publish messages. We’ve got clients for Node.js [...]

Evented programming patterns: Round-up

James Coglan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:10:25 +0000

This post is part of a series on event-driven programming. The complete series is: Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know Observable objects Deferrable values Asynchronous methods Round-up and final remarks Over the last few articles, I’ve covered a few of the evented programming patterns I use most often. It’s by no means an exhaustive account but there’s plenty [...]

Evented programming patterns: Asynchronous methods

James Coglan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:03:15 +0000

This post is part of a series on event-driven programming. The complete series is: Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know Observable objects Deferrable values Asynchronous methods Round-up and final remarks Building on the pattern for deferred processing that we just saw, asynchronous methods are typically used to return a value from a method that may have to do [...]

Evented programming patterns: Deferrable values

James Coglan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:48:51 +0000

This post is part of a series on event-driven programming. The complete series is: Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know Observable objects Deferrable values Asynchronous methods Round-up and final remarks The Deferrable pattern is a specialisation of observable objects that mixes state into the event dispatch process. The goal is to encapsulate a long-running computation as an object [...]

Evented programming patterns: Observable objects

James Coglan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:37:41 +0000

This post is part of a series on event-driven programming. The complete series is: Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know Observable objects Deferrable values Asynchronous methods Round-up and final remarks As I mentioned in the previous article, events are not things that only live in the DOM. An event is simply a point in time at which a [...]

Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know

James Coglan — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:42:15 +0000

This post is part of a series on event-driven programming. The complete series is: Events: they’re not just for the DOM, you know Observable objects Deferrable values Asynchronous methods Round-up and final remarks Over recent months we’ve seen the major JavaScript libraries talking up their event support. Back in October Luke Smith spoke about the YUI3 event system, and more recently [...]

Faye: a Comet client and server for Node.js and Rack

James Coglan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:21:00 +0000

I’m doing my traditional birthday software announcement a little early this year, mostly because I really want to get this out and partly because I’m doing a lot of little bits of work on old projects at the moment and this is the only fancy new thing I’ve got to show. Spurred on by the sheer [...]

Adding a dynamic defmacro to Heist

James Coglan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:18:45 +0000

I’ve just picked up the opening chapters of Let Over Lambda, which describes itself as a book on macro programming – particularly Common Lisp macro programming. One of the early macros given in the book is unit-of-time which looks like this: (defmacro unit-of-time (value unit) `(* ,value ,(case unit [...]

Cross-process metaprogramming on the cheap

James Coglan — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:30:33 +0000

I will preface my first post of the new decade by saying: this is not by any means elegant. It’s an egregious hack, but it may come in handy for those of you using Culerity for testing your Rails front-end using JavaScript. This is not so much about JavaScript as about dealing with the multitude [...]

Load everything asynchronously

James Coglan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:45:15 +0000

A couple weeks ago there was rather a lot of excitement over the fact that Google released a new Analytics snippet that loads the tracking library asynchronously. This is indeed great news, for reasons pored over in the aforelinked articles. But let’s take a closer look at Google’s implementation: var _gaq = _gaq || [...]

Testing command-line apps with Cucumber

James Coglan — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:21:09 +0000

.cuke-pass { color: #4e9a06; } .cuke-fail { color: #d73734; } .cuke-pending { color: #c4a000; } .cuke-skipped { color: #06989a; } I recently wrote a tiny little tool called Claw to help me work on large codebases in gEdit. It provides a terminal that lets you search for files by name and content using very minimal syntax, and it numbers [...]

Helium: a package server for JavaScript

James Coglan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:32:02 +0000

Last week, my former employer theOTHERmedia open-sourced the last project I worked on there: Helium. It’s a web application that lets you deploy JavaScript packages from Git and load them on-demand into any website by including a single script tag. There’s been a lot of innovation in JavaScript deployment recently, and Helium fits a particular [...]

Getting started with Cucumber, RSpec, Webrat and multiruby

James Coglan — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:24:47 +0000

.cuke-pass { color: #4e9a06; } .cuke-fail { color: #d73734; } .cuke-pending { color: #c4a000; } .cuke-skipped { color: #06989a; } After a couple years off from full-time Ruby/Rails work, I’m getting back into it having just joined the development team at Songkick. Much as I’ve tried to keep my hand in with the Ruby world by hacking on stuff [...]

Bluff 0.3.6: tooltips, dot graphs and sundry bug fixes

James Coglan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:27:40 +0000

A year to the day since the initial release, and following the new release of Gruff a couple of weeks ago, I’m happy to announce the release of Bluff 0.3.6. This is largely a maintenance release that pulls in patches that have gone into Gruff in the past twelve months, but it does introduce a couple [...]