Comments on: What JS devs seem to care about

By: Emil Stenqvist

Emil Stenqvist — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:47:56 +0000

I got one for the second or middle category: embedding of 3rd party Javascript, i.e. “widget based” web pages.

I think this is often overseen and passed off to the ditch of the trivial (in contrast to automatic semi-colon insertion). I mean, who doesn’t think it’s pretty natural to add a WhateverConvenientService button to your site these days? But the mechanism of said addition is done pretty much ad-hoc onver and over. Possible issues are asynchronous loading, not interfering with neighbouring embedees, versioning, what the embed code should look like, etc. There are libraries starting to emerge for this – see for example http://lightningjs.com/. Also I have written a blog post about it: http://www.shootitlive.com/2012/07/developing-an-embeddable-javascript-widget/

But – I’d like to see web standards for this – since it’s becoming such a common practice.

By: Alex Kessinger

Alex Kessinger — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:02:52 +0000

So even AMD I think falls into the flame war category. This is a pretty epic thread on the matter https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/28

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:02:16 +0000

And for all this arguing about what color stripes every JS dev has, the only thing that REALLY matters to me is that Javascript remains a pain in the butt to test and debug compared to almost any other modern language. At least Chrome keeps getting better and better dev tools, but it’s still a long way off from a real IDE.

By: Jaseem Abid

Jaseem Abid — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:48:35 +0000

@Martijn You gave me a great laugh.

By: Félix Saparelli

Félix Saparelli — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:45:08 +0000

Martijn: AMD is also the acronym for Asynchronous Module Definition, which is mostly used in RequireJS. See requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html for more information. There is somewhat of a discussion going on, esp. about AMD vs. CommonJS or whatever, although I think it has calmed down a bit. I didn't really follow it at the time.

By: Greg Fortin

Greg Fortin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:02:05 +0000

Closures, anon functions, craptastic MVC implementations and coding at a monkey level but not caring about it because the minify-GOD will make it good, you left those out. Oh, and node.js, because that is V8 and that’s like assembler for the web and stuff…

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:41:06 +0000

Kelvin: between minification and Nvidia, so not worth mentioning.

By: Kelvin

Kelvin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:33:50 +0000

What about CommonJS?

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:27:10 +0000

Martijin: Agree.. and as a side note, JS definitely runs faster on Intel!

By: karl

karl — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:23:12 +0000

@Martijn:
AMD = Asynchronous Module Definition (see http://addyosmani.com/writing-modular-js/)
I would definitely say there’s a lot of discussion around Modules and how to define/load. Some people ridicule the JS community for this but i think it’s a sign that the language is maturing. JS apps in general have a sync/async complexity that some other areas lack, that’s why it took us longer to get here and we will see more discussion before we’re finished.