Our goal at the Crisp hack summit last weekend was to migrate our 2 year old shopping app written in Meteor to the latest version and to learn about Google’s material design. Our old app was built as a way for us to learn Meteor. The structure is less than ideal, and as we learn new things we add them to the app, but don’t revisit old parts. So we followed Dan North’s experiment rewriting the app from scratch. We also decided to use Materialize for the UI. We wanted to rewrite the app in 2 days, keeping all the functionality we currently have, but at the same time adding the UI and usability improvements that we really need.

We ended up completing the rewrite in 9 days: 2 hack days and then a couple of hours each day for the next week. Not too bad for a brand new app, but surprisingly longer than we would have guessed. Both Meteor and Materialize are pretty simple to get started with, but adding Materialize to Meteor proved to be challenging. Here are some highlights!

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A few weeks ago Daniel Sundman wrote a blog entry about how to test drive JavaScript with Grunt. Today we’ll talk about how to run your Jasmine Grunt setup using Gradle!

There are no standard plugins for Grunt in Gradle, but it’s easy to add all the code manually. After all, this is Gradle not Maven 😉

We’ll assume that node and grunt-cli are already installed see (Test Driving JavaScript with Grunt).

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If you’re a TDD addict you know that it’s not always easy to Test Drive your JavaScript. Which testing framework should you use? How do you set your CI pipeline up? Etc…

There are quite a few frameworks out there and it seems like writing a testing framework is what everybody wants to do. I am pretty sure we don’t need any more. We just need them to be easy to use. In this post I’ll show you how incredibly easy it is these days to start using Grunt, Jasmine and PhantomJS.

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As JavaScript is transitioning from the dark ages as a language of ridicule to a respected language of it’s own, it is obvious that some of the rough edges need polishing.

There is no rougher edge than the global namespace issue and the difficulty providing encapsulation. Even for a seemingly trivial JavaScript application, it is no longer OK to just whip up some JavaScript files and assume that you can maintain the code base as it grows. The application now lives in the browser and the amount of code you need to maintain requires modularization.

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Backbones aren’t the usual fare for tech blogs, but if you’ve been following frontend development, then you’ll have heard of Backbone.js. From their site: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.Continue reading

As some of you may remember, a year ago I took Q3 off to focus on building a JavaScript application. I learned a lot especially about Node.js. Yassal and I have a pet project called FeedMe that we have worked on over the years. FeedMe implements a shopping list for us to use when doing

The basic premise of Node.js is that I/O is expensive and that, since I/O is expensive, we can’t block waiting for it to complete.

Many traditional Web Servers typically adopt a one thread per request approach, and any I/O (database, web service, file system call…) during the request blocks that thread of execution. This is inefficient in many ways because when the thread is blocked waiting for I/O to complete, it can’t respond to other requests.

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It turns out that I’ve gotten completely side tracked…or maybe not side tracked per se, but at least not completely focused on the client side of the Application. The past couple of weeks I’ve been engulfed in Node. Trying to figure out what it is, what I can do with it and obviously how I can test drive it. I found nodeunit which seemed to be a good testing framework candidate.

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As I mentioned in my previous entry, the goal of my sabbatical is to build a JavaScript Application. Notice the emphasis is on Application. That is, I don’t intend to build a JavaEE web application with plenty of JavaScript. The goal is to build an Application in the browser. It will probably (eventually), communicate with a server side component for persistent storage and synchronization but for now, that’s secondary.
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Brendan Eich har kanske den intressantaste bloggen om internetpolitik på hög nivå (hur kommer vi att göra webbapplikationer i framtiden, typ). Han skapade JavaScrip, och när han skriver något är det nästan alltid högintressant. ECMAScript 4 (nästa stora uppgradering av JavaScript) får många nya features för att skriva stora applikationer, och det verkar göra Microsoft

För er som inte knarkar tekniknyheter lika okontrollerat som jag gör har jag nöjet att få summera de senaste 5-6 veckorna inom områdena Java, Ajax, Scrum och annat av intresse. Tro mig, jag har gallrat stenhårt. JUnit 4.4 släpptes nyligen. Nyheterna var inte speciellt upphetsande. En av mina favoritbloggare, Cederic Beust, har skrivit om dynamiska

Min kollega Daniel Sundman har skapat en mycket bra presentation av JavaScript, utifrån en Java programmerares synvinkel. På vilket sätt är språken olika, vad kan man göra för coola grejer i JavaScript, och hur gör man generellt olika saker i det språket? Det bästa med presentationen är att den är gjord för att köras i

Många spel har under det senaste året konverterats till Ajax, ändå blev jag förvånad när jag upptäckte att någon på Yahoo gjort en riktigt bra version av Breakout i JavaScript. Tanken svindlar vid tanken på hur mycket jobb det måste ha varit.

Jag har alltid varit skeptisk till X-et i Ajax, dvs XML. Varför skapa och skicka ett så bökigt format som XML från servern, för att sedan processas i JavaScript, ett språk som inte så många är duktiga på? Nu har Rik Arends skapat JSLT, som ger möjlighet att processa XML med hjälp av JavaScript-syntax som

En grupp utvecklare bestämde sig för att pröva Flex2 för sin produkt, men kom fram till att det inte var stabilt nog för annat än små applikationer. De har nu gått tillbaka till kombinationen JavaScript/Dojo/Prototype/DWR, och är nu produktiva igen.

Hittade just Brendan Eichs blog, hjärnan bakom JavaScript. Jag lyssnade på ett keynote speech han höll för ett år sedan på konferensen The Ajax Experience, och hans berättelse om hur det gick till var rätt fascinerande. Jag fick intrycket att de hackade ihop allt på typ två veckor för att det skulle med en specifik

Tobie Langel har skrivit en mycket instruktiv artikel (med det fyndiga namnet "A fistful of $$") för hur han hackade ihop JavaScript koden till auto-scrolling page navigation, så att texten auto-scrollar (istället för att bara hoppa) när man klickar på en länk som pekar till ett ankare på samma sida. Det enda man behöver göra