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Harmony with TypeScript

JavaScript November 16, 2012

On the way to harmony Not so long ago Microsoft announced a new language, targeting on front-end developers. Everybody’s first reaction was like “Why on Earth?!” Is it just Microsoft darting back to Google? Is that a trick to promote their Visual Studio? But anyway, what’s wrong with JavaScript? Why everybody is so keen to replace it? JavaScript for a language designed in only 2 weeks is freakishly powerful and flexible.

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Review: PHP Application Development with NetBeans

How to November 15, 2012

Recently I’ve laid my hands on a copy of [“PHP Application Development with NetBeans” by M A Hossain Tonu](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849515808 ““PHP Application Development with NetBeans” by M A Hossain Tonu”) (www.PacktPub.com). It appeared to be a really nice reading. One of those where it’s hard to put the book down until the end. It must be valuable as for beginners as for experienced NetBeans users. I, personally, have been using NetBeans for about 4 years and still find in the book the features I wasn’t aware about or unfairly ignored for so long.

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Optimizing Mobile Navigation: A Smooth UX for Small Screens

Mobile Web October 27, 2012

Making design responsive means not only certain representations on different screens, but also particular behavior on different devices. Usually on mobile devices mouse is not available, keyboard with navigation keys is out of reach. So we are short of controls to provide a useful navigation. Image viewer Let’s take image viewer. User taps a thumbnail and gets an overlay with the image. We don’t have much screen space on the smartphone.

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My lovely Mac OS X web-development environment

How to October 15, 2012

A few months ago I bought a new Macbook. I’m really fond of the development environment I set up on it. The more I work with it, the more I love it. However, while building the environment I couldn’t find any decent step-by-step manual. So, it took me for a while to get what I wanted. Here’s my experience. Front-end environment For the beginning we need a package manager.

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Getting started with TypeScript

JavaScript October 12, 2012

After Microsoft released TypeScript I took a look at their examples and found the idea pretty promising. I do love JavaScript. However, it has its bad parts. JavaScript doesn’t provide any built-in facilities to declare interfaces or object abstraction. There is no explicit way to have type annotations and type checking. Well, even class-based OOP is not a part of the language. Flexibility of JavaScript is incredible. So, there are tons of libraries meant to work-around these inconveniences.

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10 things you need to know about JavaScript

JavaScript July 10, 2012

Back in 1995 Netscape wanted a language with a simple programming model, but flexible enough for building real scalable applications. Curious, that Brendan Eich accomplished the task in a few weeks. So, we have JavaScript which seems so simple that many people don’t even bother to learn the language while using it. And yet it works! However, it turned out to be one of the reasons why JavaScript was dramatically misunderstood .

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Functional testing with qUnit

jQuery July 3, 2012

Automated testing is an essential part of application life-cycle (see Continuous Integration). In web-development we usually test: Back-end (*Unit-tests), Front-end (HTML/CSS validators, JSLint/JSHint, CSSLint, YSlow etc) and UI (functional testing). Unit-testing (Back-end, Front-end) is about checking if all the application components adhere the technical design requirements. Every unit-test simulates the application environment on which runs. Functional tests are to determine if the application as a whole ecosystem has no flaws. They run on a copy of real application environment and show if everything is ok from user prospective.

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Scalable JavaScript Application

JavaScript May 31, 2012

Make of JavaScript the language you need Any diligent developer is constantly working on improving his or her code. There are plenty of books telling how to make your code better. However most of them use the language of class-based OOP. Reader must have enough of experience to reflect those classical design patterns on JavaScript. Thus, many and many developers give up on the language before mastering its true power. That is one of major reasons JavaScript is referred sometimes as The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language.

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Pseudo-classical Inheritance in JavaScript for Modules

JavaScript May 24, 2012

The classical design of object in JavaScript can be expressed like: var ConstructorFunc = function () { var _privateMember = "private member"; } ConstructorFunc.prototype.publicMember = "private member"; ConstructorFunc.prototype.privilegedMethod = function () { return _privateMember; }; Pretty clumsy, isn’t it? I prefer the module design propagated so indefatigably by Addy Osmani (http://addyosmani.com/largescalejavascript/): var Module = function () { // Constructor's job var _privateMember = "private member"; return { publicMember : "private member", privilegedMethod : function () { return _privateMember; } } } It looks much nicer to me.

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Dependency Injection via Factory

Refactoring January 21, 2012

You know, when coupling is not loose, components depend too much on each other. It makes your entire architecture fragile and immobile. You can check how loose the coupling is by making a unit test for a component. If you have no problem substituting dependencies by e.g. mock objects then everything is ok. Let take a model class. It depends on DB connection, here \Lib\Db\Adapter\Interfaceinstance. We cannot just create DB adapter instance within model constructor, because it depends on configuration data which doesn’t belong to the model.

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Design by Contract and JS

Refactoring December 22, 2011

Related articles: Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript for Modulesand Scalable JavaScript Application DesignDesign by contract (DbC) is an approach in application design, which originally came from Eiffel, but now widely used on different languages (particularly in Java). In real world one party (supplier) makes an offer for an agreement (business contract) and another one (client) accepts. The same way can be described relations between objects in software engineering. As a declared agreement is accepted by the client object, the last one is expected to keep its rules.

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Flyweight pattern using Mixins

Refactoring December 18, 2011

In my previous article among other patters I was telling about Flyweight. That is about the objects designed so to minimize memory use by sharing as much data as possible with other similar objects. You can find plenty of Flyweight implementation examples in Internet, though it will be mostly variations of Multiton, a collection (map) keeping only instance per every identical object. And I decided to follow that unwritten rule as it seems to be the simplest way to show the idea.

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