javascript

A while ago I have written a post about JavaScript helpers in Ruby on Rails and tried to explain why they are a bad idea. It’s hard to believe for me that it was almost 2 years ago! Since then so many things have happened in the Ruby world…Now Rails 3 is on its way and we already know what significant improvements and changes it will include. One of them is related to JavaScript helpers and the way how remote links and forms will be handled and I must admit that the new idea is absolutely great. ...

Web applications are getting more and more complex. The user interface of a modern web application can be as rich as its desktop equivalent. If we use JavaScript/HTML/CSS trio to build this UI then we definitely want to use AJAX. A typical approach is to use AJAX to update parts of our page using an HTML response, everyone knows that, right? Does this approach allow us to create a responsive, fast and flexible UI? The answer is no. ...

Recently, new versions of jQuery and Prototype have been released – it’s a perfect moment for a part number 2. On the official Prototype blog we can read that the general performance of CSS selectors is now improved, unfortunately only for Safari 3, but Element#up/#down/#next/#previous should now be faster on all browsers, it’s a good news as they were really slow. On the other hand we have jQuery official announcement with information that jQuery is now 300% faster – we’ll see! ...

Prototype 1.6.0 was released to the public 4 days ago, at first I decided to check its performance and new features in comparison to the previous version, but being interested in other JavaScript libraries, I’ve changed my mind. Lets see how you can accomplish same tasks with the latest Prototype and jQuery libraries and simply see which one is faster. In this part I’m going to show the results of running single operations, in next part(s) I will prepare a sample website and write more complex test cases and, again, check how fast jQuery and Prototype can be (or how slow…). ...

Ruby on Rails gained so much attention and appreciation mostly because it simplifies the development process of AJAX-driven applications. When I started to learn Rails I was already very familiar with other MVC-based frameworks, and actually I’ve created one myself (in PHP5) in my previous work. My framework also uses Prototype JavaScript library, so when l was learning Rails it was nothing new when I saw “Ajax.Updater(…)”. I remember that when I added first AJAX-feature in the Depot (it’s a tutorial application used in well known “Agile Web Development in Ruby on Rails” book) I was shocked about how simple it is, but then I looked into the HTML output and it shocked me once more… ...