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I occasionally write about implementing design patterns in JavaScript. They’re an excellent way of building upon proven approaches to solving common development problems, and I think there’s a lot of benefit to using them. But while well-known JavaScript patterns are useful, another side of development could benefit from its own set of design patterns: jQuery plugins. The official jQuery plugin authoring guide offers a great starting point for getting into writing plugins and widgets, but let’s take it further.
Plugin development has evolved over the past few years. We no longer have just one way to write plugins, but many. In reality, certain patterns might work better for a particular problem or component than others. Some developers may wish to use the jQuery UI widget factory; it’s great for complex, flexible UI components. Some may not. Some might like to structure their plugins more like modules (similar to the module pattern) or use a more formal module format such as AMD. And so on.
Read more...Welcome to the first entry in a new series on Smashing Coding called Sidenotes. Sidenotes are shorter than traditional Smashing Magazine articles and are designed to give you a quick introduction to useful tools and services. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at productivity aids, useful apps, essential plugins and code examples that we think will help you in your daily coding work. If there is a tool, product or service that you think would be great to review, please do get in touch and let us know.
First up is LiveReload, a utility that eliminates the need to refresh the browser when you want to see HTML, CSS and JavaScript changes.
Read more...When I started developing websites, back in the days when we wrote HTML proudly in uppercase, Web development frameworks didn’t really exist in the form we have today. I’m sure I’m not the only one who could dig out a folder of “include” files that helped me handle repetitive coding functions such as interacting with databases and forms.
Today, we can choose from a huge array of frameworks, which provide us with different approaches to creating websites. If you are like me, you probably just ended up using a framework either because your job required it or because you like trying out new technologies and found one that works for you. But if you had to choose anew today, which would you pick?
Read more...In school, I hated math. It was a dire, dry and boring thing with stuffy old books and very theoretical problems. Even worse, a lot of the tasks were repetitive, with a simple logical change in every iteration (dividing numbers by hand, differentials, etc.). It was exactly the reason why we invented computers. Suffice it to say, a lot of my math homework was actually done by my trusty Commodore 64 and some lines of Basic, with me just copying the results later on.
These tools and the few geometry lessons I had gave me the time and inspiration to make math interesting for myself. I did this first and foremost by creating visual effects that followed mathematical rules in demos, intros and other seemingly pointless things. There is a lot of math in the visual things we do, even if we don’t realize it. If you want to make something look natural and move naturally, you need to add a bit of physics and rounding to it.
Read more...Google Search likes simple, easy-to-crawl websites. You like dynamic websites that show off your work and that really pop. But search engines can’t run your JavaScript. That cool AJAX routine that loads your content is hurting your SEO. Google’s robots parse HTML with ease; they can pull apart Word documents, PDFs and even images from the far corners of your website. But as far as they’re concerned, AJAX content is invisible.
AJAX has revolutionized the Web, but it has also hidden its content. If you have a Twitter account, try viewing the source of your profile page. There are no tweets there — just code! Almost everything on a Twitter page is built dynamically through JavaScript, and the crawlers can’t see any of it. That’s why Google developed AJAX crawling.
Read more...People in boardrooms across the world love a good graph. They go nuts for PowerPoint, bullet points and phrases like “run it up the flagpole,” “blue-sky thinking” and “low-hanging fruit,” and everything is always “moving forward.” Backwards is not an option for people who facilitate paradigm shifts in the zeitgeist. Graphs of financial projections, quarterly sales figures and market saturation are a middle-manager’s dream.
How can we as Web designers get in on all of this hot graph action? There are actually quite a few ways to display graphs on the Web. We could simply create an image and nail it to a Web page. But that’s not very accessible or interesting. We could use Flash, which is quite good for displaying graphs — but again, not very accessible. Besides, designers, developers and deities are falling out of love with Flash.
Read more...The flexible box layout module — or “flexbox,” to use its popular nickname — is an interesting part of the W3C Working Draft. The flexbox specification is still a draft and subject to change, so keep your eyes on the W3C, but it is part of a new arsenal of properties that will revolutionize how we lay out pages. At least it will be when cross-browser support catches up.
In the meantime, we can experiment with flexbox and even use it on production websites where fallbacks will still render the page correctly. It may be a little while until we consider it as mainstream as, say, border-radius, but our job is to investigate new technologies and use them where possible. That said, when it comes to something as fundamental as page layout, we need to tread carefully.
Created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, Node.js is a relatively new technology which has gained a lot of popularity among Web developers recently. However, not everyone knows what it really is. Node.js is essentially a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. What this means is simple: it’s an environment which is intended for writing scalable, high performance network applications. It's like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted, but it takes the event model a bit further—it presents the event loop as a language construct instead of as a library.
And that’s not all: what’s really great about Node.js is the thousands of modules available for any purpose, as well as the vibrant community behind this young project. In this round-up, you will find the most useful resources for Node.js, from handy tools to detailed tutorials, not to mention in-depth articles and resources on this promising technology. Do you use Node.js already? Let us know in the comments to this post!
Read more...With CSS animation now supported in both Firefox and Webkit browsers, there is no better time to give it a try. Regardless of its technical form, whether traditional, computer-generated 3-D, Flash or CSS, animation always follows the same basic principles.
In this article, we will take our first steps with CSS animation and consider the main guidelines for creating animation with CSS. We’ll be working through an example, building up the animation using the principles of traditional animation. Finally, we’ll see some real-world usages.
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