For Rails developers, Backbone + Rails + CoffeeScript is a perfect combination, server side MVC experience can be easily carried over to the Client side

With the release of Rails 3.1.0 last night most Rails devs were rejoicing. (You can view the Rails 3.1 Release Notes here). But of course, as the Rails community is comprised of an alarming level of passionate developers, most of us could predict a few diva-style outbursts about the new changes this morning.

Last Friday I decided to celebrate _whyday by taking a departure from my normal open source path and writing some Javascript (well, technically Coffeescript). So today we're announcing Sketch.js, a simple jQuery library to enable HTML5 Canvas "sketchpads" for any web application.

I tell myself that I write JS every day, but I don’t. I write jQuery. Don’t get me wrong, it gets the job done. But it never feels right. Now, jQuery and its DOM-centric approach (at least in common usage) aren’t all to blame. Its just as much my fault in that beyond the library, I know very little about the language. I intend to do something about it. I have a plan and I’m going to share it with you. First, here are my goals: