The jQuery Boston conference or how to write jQuery professionally.

I wanted to round up a bit my thoughts about this year Boston jQuery conference. If you had a look at the talks descriptions you certainly saw that there were a lot of talks about code organization, unit testing, templating and etc. It seems this year has really been the year where experienced jQuery developers wanted to evolve outside the DOM that jQuery is so good at abstracting.

It certainly feels weird, when you think about it, that this year conference was all about adding complexity to your code when the most probable reason why jQuery as so much market share is because of its simplicity.

In the keynote, John Resig said that jQuery constantly gaining share momentum and was something like on 30% of overall websites,…

Apple changes the iPhone SDK TOS, creates a tsunami in the web community

Jobs certainly knows what he is doing, I was listening at the 4.0 OS presentation and boy, was it everything you wanted it to be… With every new iPhone OS Apple has brought excellent features. Then again, you also have the other Apple side that want to control everything.

Apple changes the TOS and chooses a wording that basically says that you can’t use an API not written in OBJECTIVE-C for creating Apple apps.

“3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile…

In video: John Resig on Advanced Javascript to Improve your Web App

In February 2010 John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. During this 25 minute talk John outlines many of the new features and ideas behind jQuery 1.4.

Source from ThinkVitamin.

CSS3 transform is coming in a browser near you (even in IE)

There has been some cool developments lately on the use of CSS3 transform properties. First we have Dojo has announced that the next version of dojo.fx will support CSS3 transform. You can see the demo here.

Another nice project, cssSandpaper is a js animation framework making the use of CSS3 transform easy.

Check it out, those two are well worth the read.

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps

Do you instinctively know them before looking at this video?

Form Validation Engine 1.6.4

Version 1.6.4 is now online. One major upgrade, you can now validate from any function in your script. You are no more bounded to the custom regex engine. And a minor update, you can now click on the bubble to make them disappear, in case they are in the way.

Here how it works:

In your field add:

In your language js file have something like (nname is the function name to call):

Now the custom function that could be anywhere in your JS

In video: Optimizing your javascript!

If you are in a company that build corporate websites, chances are you probably never had to optimize your javascript. Websites in general have 3 or 4 ‘widget’ that in the end do not really slow down the page load.

But when you start doing web applications, you start to feel the load you impose to your browser at every page. This is where optimizing your javascript becomes crucial.

Server change alert! position-absolute move to webfaction

For now more than a year position-absolute.com has been hosted by linode. Linode offer great unmanaged VPS hosting. This has really been beneficial for my own experience to delve in the Linux world and build my web server from scratch. Buuuutt the time comes when I don’t want to play in apache and mysql config anymore.

Webfaction is a great semi-managed VPS hosting. You get half the ram you would get with an unmanaged VPS but installing an application is as easy as using wordpress. For example, you can deploy a Django application in about 5 minutes.

Things might be unstable for a couple of days.

Give Internet Explorer 9 a test drive

Want to look at what is under the wheel for internet explorer 9? You can download a test drive at this address http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.

For now it is confirmed that IE9 will support addEventListener (lol) and border-radius, it score 55 on the Acid3 test. It was also said that IE9 will be GPU powered, from what I can gather, this is only true with SVG.

Canvas seems to be out of the question, every drawing demo are done with SVG.

Update: the complete change list http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/releasenotes/

A call to all web developers, launching a twitter campaign to force webkit to implement a position fixed in mobile webkit

Hey guys,

I need YOU for 2 minutes,

Some of you guys might not know that it is impossible to have a fixed toolbar in mobile webkit, this is because we can’t fix anything to the gridview webkit produce.

This is something we need if one day we really want to be a contender to replace native applications.

If you have 2 minute sign the petition by going to http://www.abettermobileweb.com and click on the big button at the bottom.