[Web-SIG] JavaScript libraries

[Rene Dudfield]

Hello,

I've been doing a lot of javascript stuff recently with
http://www.pretendpaper.com/

So far javascript has been 90% of the time I have spent on the site.

At the begining I was using dynapi for some javascript stuff.  Which
is quite an ok javascript library.  However as the abstraction was
really big fixing the many bugs for new things I was doing was harder.
 If you can live with what you get with dynapi, it is a really good
library which can go a long way towards making code compatible to even
NS 4.0.

So definitely look at DynAPI, as well as the quirksmode, and jsolait
sites for javascript libraries and ideas.

I have a bunch of javascript stuff which is not on the
pretendpaper.com live site because it crashes browsers hard.  So far I
have crashed most browsers many times.  Most recently a safari crash
which made the browser unusable on that computer despite best efforts
to wipe the cache, and all settings :(

Then there are event timing issues, which are all different with each
browser.  I haven't quite figured out all the work arounds with
different versions of IE yet.  I am also forced to use iframes for
scrolling at the moment.  As it has been quite hard to get javascript
scrolling of layers working nicely even across the latest versions of
safari, firefox and ie.  It might be one place where I will need
different implementations for different browsers.

Once the DHTML version of the site is working nicely with the latest
browsers I am going to do a static version of the site.  The static
version will be very light on css(which is also very crashable), and
pretty much no js/flash.

I am using xmlrpc for the python -> javascript comunication.  With
jsolait.  This could be swapped out with jsonrpc later if needed.  As
xmlrpc is a little bit slow with js.  jsonrpc doesn't have to parse
xml with javascript, so it is lots faster.  xmlrpc can also be used to
talk to flash, as well as lots of other libraries easily like C++/php
etc.  Exporting stuff later from python is simple...  exporting things
to SOAP/JSONRPC/Pyro will be quite trivial.

Javascript is a really nice language.  It is well worth learning for
people doing web development, as there are so many good things you can
do with it.  You can also use it within flash too.  As flash
actionscript is pretty much javascript with a different api.  However
the biggest problem is still working around the bugs, and different
implementations behaviours.



Cheers,

Rene Dudfield

e: "@".join( reversed(['madecollective.com', 'rene']) )
w: http://www.madecollective.com/
w: http://www.pretendpaper.com/
For creative, and technical services contact us @ made.