Convenience Syntax in Examples

This is a "meta" post, e.g., it's about the blog itself.

In many of my posts, I give code examples to illustrate a point. To avoid cluttering the examples up with browser-specific stuff, I'm using a couple of calls from the Prototype library.

Actually, right now, just the one: Event.observe(). This function hooks up an event handler in a way that is consistent across browsers, even Internet Explorer, which is good because IE doesn't support the standard addEventListener() function, and its own attachEvent() function behaves slightly differently (within the handler, "this" is the global object, like in old DOM0 handlers; whereas with addEventListener it's the element you're hooking the event to). Prototype's Event.observe() ensures that "this" is always the element, even on IE, and also does some housekeeping to try to mitigate an IE bug where it tends to leak memory if you use closures as event handlers (which is incredibly common).

If I use more Prototype stuff, I'll list it here as well, but this is only about trying to keep the examples simple and clear, not about using Prototype or any other specific library...

Now at blog.niftysnippets.org

Just briefly, this blog is now at http://blog.niftysnippets.org, rather than http://niftysnippets.blogspot.com. It's still hosted by Blogger (for now), and Blogger is kind enough to forward you from the old address, but if for some reason you're a regular reader of this blog, it's worth updating your Atom/RSS links just in case someday I end up hosting it myself or moving to Wordpress or something...

Nifty Snippets

Welcome to Nifty Snippets, my new blog for capturing little snippets of code and techniques (as well as engineering, business, and teamwork "lessons learned"). Initially the focus will be on Ajax stuff, and that means lots of JavaScript.

Now, JavaScript is about 18 times more interesting than most people think. This is not a toy language, this is an incredibly rich, powerful, expressive language that until recently has been dramatically under-used. Partially that's because of how it was introduced to the world (scripting events in Netscape Navigator), and partially I suspect it's down to a bias many of us had toward hierarchical, class-based languages like Java and C++. JavaScript is neither hierarchical nor class-based; it's a prototype language.

This first post is just meant to say "hi". (Hi!) But I'll also throw out a few handy links for those with an interest in JavaScript, Ajax, and rich web applications:

• If you're doing any serious work in JavaScript, read Crockford. If there's something powerful and interesting about the JavaScript language, the odds are Douglas Crockford has written about it in detail. Don't let the depth of the language daunt you, you can ease your way into it.
  
• Similarly, if you're doing Ajax apps, you need JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan [O'Reilly, Amazon].
• Lots of people are really getting a lot out of Prototype, which is basically a bunch of nifty stuff for JavaScript wrapped up into a toolkit.
• Many of those same people are enjoying the various effects and other goodness available via script.aculo.us.
• Alternately, perhaps you'd like to peruse one of the dozens of other JavaScript toolkits out there.

Those'll get you started, anyway. Back soon with our first snippet!