JavaScript
Javascript generators and functional reactive programming
tl;dr: ECMAScript 6 introduces a language feature called generators, which are really great for working with asynchronous code that uses promises. But they do not work well for functional reactive programming. …
Functional Reactive Programming in JavaScript
I had a great time at NodePDX last week. There were many talks packed into a short span of time and I saw many exciting ideas presented. One topic that seemed particularly useful to me was Chris Meiklejohn’s talk on Functional Reactive Programming (FRP). …
Promise Pipelines in JavaScript
Promises, also know as deferreds or futures, are a wonderful abstraction for manipulating asynchronous actions. Dojo has had Deferreds for some time. jQuery introduced its own Deferreds in version 1.5 based on the CommonJS Promises/A specification. I'm going to show you some recipes for working with jQuery Deferreds. Use these techniques to turn callback-based spaghetti code into elegant declarative code.
Monkey patching document.write()
This is one of the crazier workarounds that I have implemented. I was working on a web page that embeds third-party widgets. The widgets are drawn in the page document - they do not get their own frames. And sometimes the widgets are redrawn after page load. We had a problem with one widget invoking document.write(). In case you are not familiar with it, if that method is called while the page is rendering it inserts content into the DOM immediately after the script tag in which the call is made. But if document.write() is called after page rendering is complete it erases the entire DOM. When this widget was redrawn after page load it would kill the whole page. …