SolutionBot

Smushit is an interesting web service that reduces the size of images by trimming off the "cruft" that is leftover in an image, but without reducing the quality of the image.

The new firefox 3.1 has just been released. Touting its new "tracemonkey" javascript engine it is certainly one of the most powerful browsers on the market to date. I’ve been using it throughout the day and am extremely impressed. Sites that use javascript heavily are far less clunky. Firefox 3.1 is just another example in the web trends we are now seeing. Clearly there is no doubt that javascript is not a dead language. Far from it. It is, and is becoming more and more the web standard. Web sites are no longer exciting if they don’t have javascript special effects and AJAX. We have yet to hear from Microsoft what IE is doing to keep up the pace with other browsers. Hopefully we will see something soon.

I just installed minefield on my computer and enabled the new TraceMonkey javascript engine and all I can say is wow. In case you don’t know what TraceMonkey is, in short it is an extremely powerful javascript engine that allows for native compiling of javascript. Javascript is now competing with compiled languages instead of interpreted scripting languages. To see TraceMonkey in action for yourself simply download ‘MineField’ from Mozilla and go to your config (about:config) and set javascript.options.jit.content to ‘true’.

Debugging is something that all mortal programmers must do. Any programmer who claims that his code is perfect the first time he writes it is #1 Lying #2 A legendary immortal Greek god of Programming. I for one am not a legendary immortal Greek god of Programming so I need methods to debug the code that I write. In this article, I’ll be talking about methods of debugging Javascript in Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. Part II will be debugging Javascript in Eclipse and Firefox.

Most browsers are similar in the sense that they all have a javascript engine and a css engine that processes css code in your style sheets or inline in your html and the javascript engine typically has access to most if not all of the css properties. Browsers differ in what css properties are available to be modified in javascript. Here is a quick piece of code that creates a list of all css properties are available to the javascript engine in your browser. The list will differ depending on what browser your using.

When thinking about optimizing your web application, something to consider is javascript and css compression. There are a few good javascript and css compressors, one you can use for free online is http://www.creativyst.com/Prod/3/. However these can obfuscate your code so that it isn’t readable. Sometimes that is the goal, but for projects in which you want to keep your code readable there are other methods to keep your code smaller.

There are many date add methods online. I recently needed a simple bulletproof method for dateadd and didn’t like any of the ones i found online so i figured i would actually sit down and write one ;). Here’s what I came up with.

I’ve recently been working on a large javascript based application that does a lot of DOM manipulation. There are literally thousands of loops throughout the application that traverse the DOM and make changes in some way shape or form. The application has been running slow of late and we’ve been working through small ways to optimize performance. One of the things that I noticed is that literally all of our loops were written the following way:

CSS has many useful ways of getting the element you want to style. Most of us have seen using the ‘#’ sign to select your element by id or using ‘.’ to select an element with a specific class name. However there is a lesser known yet very helpful selector. CSS2 allows you to select an element based on any attribute using ‘[]‘ brackets.