Using Underscore's chaining syntax, you can cut down on the cognitive load of working in a mixed-library environment.

Background

As a Rails developer I normally spend most of my time on backend development, implementing features and functionalities. I am really confident about my Rails skills for backend work but rarely have I felt any happiness doing frontend work before. But things have changed since working on the new responsive intridea.com. I started some interesting frontend work from this project and fell in love with many UI skills and JS tricks, especially Pjax which I want to talk more about in this post.

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:

If you've upgraded to the recently released jQuery 1.5, you may have heard about the fancy new AJAX facilities that allow you to define things in novel ways.

The Node Knockout is this weekend **right now** and I've been trying to teach myself Node and get ready in a variety of ways. One of the most important (and least clear) aspects of preparation was figuring out how to properly vendor the latest Node libraries for use in Heroku. I've got NPM up and running locally, but as of its latest release it has no built-in support for vendoring. Here's how I managed.

If you’ve taken a look at Mustache, the “stupid in a good way” templating engine, you might know that there are also Javascript Mustache renderers such as Mustache.js. Today we’ve released a small library called mustache_json that allows you to compile your Mustache view objects into JSON, allowing them to be interpreted by Javascript Mustache rendering engines.