Addy Osmani introduces backbone.js as one part of the toolkit for building mobile JavaScript web applications. Backbone is an MVC-like framework to structure your application, simplifies server-side persistence, decouples the DOM from data, succinctly separates apps into Models, views and routers and provides synchronisation between DOM, model and collections.
Remy Sharp dissects a piece of jQuery code pointing out the red flags. Each flag is taken in turn, explained and shown how to correct. Takes into account context and the flexibility of jQuery
Simon Willison blogs about how JQuery won him over. From its faddish start based around CSS selectors (getElementsBySelector), and method chaining, Simon now sees the library in a new light. Simon shows how jQuery supports modern development best practice such as namespaces, giving a quick nod to the richness of jQuery selectors (DOM, CSS and XPath). JQuery's event handling looks natural and offers an event when the dom is ready. It exposes custom events for non-trivial Ajax requests. Simon's so convinced about jQuery that he's willing to overlook his rule that developers should know how a library works before using it.
Tim Huegdon and Mark Aidan Thomas create an elegant wrapper to the YUI Connection Manager that manages repeating Ajax JSON requests. Tim describes the use of Custom Events, and the use of the Observer design pattern, dissects the code and offers a tidy demonstration of the working code. This simplifies JSON requests into declaring a simple function to process the returned JSON object, and a single line to fire off the request (within a setInterval if required)
Another Douglas Crockford video. This time Douglas talks about the Document Object Model, about how Java failed, and JavaScript evolved thanks to DHTML and DOM. He talks about how to use DOM to traversing and manipulating elements in an HTML document, walking the DOM, making elements, innerHTML, as well as Events, memory leaks. He talks about the cracks in DOM, and how we must be prepared to back off when we hit the browser limits of DOM.
Christian Heilmann describes an approach to building complex web application by basing them around events, particularly around YUI's CustomEvent class.
Guides, notes, overviews, documentation for the Prototype library. Pathfinder compiles a list of useful resources for this library.
Ryan Campbell shows how to get the Prototype library up and running, and introduces and documents Protoype's $() function. Form helper functions, getElementsByClassName functions, Element helper functions, Ajax support, timer functions are all covered.
Michael Mahemoff runs into a problem with Protypes $$ function when looking for class names. Its taking over 90 seconds when more than 100 matches are returned. The advice is: Avoid $$(".classname") on large DOMs.
Ryan Campbell volume tests Prototype's each() Enumeration function and finds that although the code is more elegant than the for loops, the overhead is quite heavy, and the performance impact too high. The summary: If basic JavaScript will do the task, then use basic JavaScript