CoffeeScript is a programming language that transcompiles to JavaScript. The language adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell to enhance JavaScript’s brevity and readability, as well as adding more sophisticated features like array comprehension and pattern matching. CoffeeScript compiles predictably to JavaScript and programs can be written with less code (typically 1/3 fewer lines) with no effect on runtime performance. Let me introduce some cool useful tutorials.
The Yahoo! YUI is an incredibly feature-rich JavaScript library with a LOT of functionality but getting your head around all of those features can be tough. The YUI team wants to help developers get up and running more quickly and announced yesterday the release of SimpleYUI; a basic and more streamlined version of the YUI library.
SimpleYUI will contain basic DOM access and manipulation including support for CSS 3 selectors in the selector engine, animations via the new transition module, the event system, Ajax and JSON support.
The great thing is that when you’re ready to leverage more advanced features like managed attributes and custom events, you still have the ability to do on-demand loading just like you’d expect from the full-featured version of YUI. This includes any YUI 2 or 3 component or YUI 3 Gallery module.
<script>
Y.use(‘dd-drag’,‘yui2-datatable’, ‘gallery-accordion’, function(Y) {
// here you can use YUI 3 Drag and drop, YUI 2 DataTable, Accordian or any other control contributed to the gallery by the community
});
</script>
YUI team member Eric Miraglia put up a nice post about SimpleYUI which shows you some of the goodness include.
How quickly do users actually upgrade their browsers? It’s a question that seems to come up frequently and is definitely on the minds of developers who want to know when they’ll be able to leverage the best features for their apps. Overall, I think the major browser makers try to share important usage information but the this specific data isn’t reported often enough. It was great to see that Pingdom did their own analysis of the issue and even offered a comparison of the upgrade mechanisms used by the browser makers.
From the report, it shows that Google’s Chrome has by far the fastest upgrade time of all the browsers, generally converting users within a month of a new release. This is very impressive and primarily due to the browser’s use of automatic updating.
Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple & Opera all take a milder approach with Mozilla being slightly more direct using user prompts that try to explain the benefits of upgrading instead of forcing them to.
It’s certainly a balancing act between keep users up-to-date and allowing users to have a choice. What do you feel is the best update solution?
