Category Archives: Javascript

MelbJS June 2013 Summary

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Shine Technologies

MelbJS held an event last Wednesday, and the turnout was amazing in spite of the dreary weather. If I recall rightly, it was the biggest turnout for this event to date. It must have been the impressive line up of … Continue reading →

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Web Directions Code 2013

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Shine Technologies

The second incarnation of the Web Directions Code conference was this year on 2.-3. May, and I was fortunate enough to both attend and speak. The conference held in Melbourne Town Hall was the place to geek out about all … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript, Node.js, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Backbone Boilerplate Vs. Rails Asset Pipeline

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Shine Technologies

We recently shifted from Backbone Boilerplate to the Rails Asset Pipeline for generating the various assets (Javascript, CSS, HTML, images, etc) that comprise teamstuff.com, a single-page app. In this post I’ll talk about our motivations for making the shift, what we had to change to get … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript, Tools | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

A Chatty Atmosphere

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Shine Technologies

A leading online learning provider recently engaged us to add social features to their website so that students could more easily collaborate, and thus be more successful with their study. One of the main social features required was providing students … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript | Tagged | 7 Comments

An Identity Map for Backbone.js

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Shine Technologies

One problem with single-page apps is that application state can stick around for longer than it would in a more traditional request-response web app. Because your users aren’t refreshing the page very often, you can have JavaScript objects sitting around … Continue reading →

Posted in Javascript | Tagged , | 6 Comments

JSConf Down Under: A Conference Report

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Shine Technologies

I attended JSConf Down Under yesterday. The conference format was quite straightforward: one day, one stream, nine speakers. In this post I’ll talk about the three things at the conference that had the biggest impression on me: Brendan Eich’s presentation … Continue reading →

Posted in Javascript, Opinion | Tagged | 2 Comments

Efficient Stateful Views With Backbone, Part 2: Collections & Animations

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Shine Technologies

In Part 1 of this blog series, we saw how UI state could be maintained efficiently in a Backbone app by introducing view-management infrastructure and retaining references to views. In Part 2, I’m going to talk about how this strategy … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Efficient Stateful Views with Backbone.js, Part 1

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Shine Technologies

One of the good things about single-page apps is that it’s possible for them to remember UI state within a page. If an area of the page is hidden from the user, and then redisplayed later, you’re able to display … Continue reading →

Posted in AJAX, Javascript | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Javascript Module Loading + Shared Namespaces = Badness

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Shine Technologies

Both module loaders and shared namespaces are valid techniques for modularising your JavaScript code. However, doing both at the same time is a recipe for difficult-to-track defects.

Posted in Javascript | 1 Comment

Halo Vert.x – Building a Chatbot With Vert.x

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Shine Technologies

A little while ago I did an internal talk at Shine describing the use cases and benefits of using asynchronous web technologies. As part of the talk I showcased a little demo I’d put together called Haloworld. Haloworld is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Javascript | Tagged , | 3 Comments