I just wrote a new post (http://www.zonkio.com/the-javascript-injection-problem_685.html) on Zonkio. The post is about the dangers of javascript injection and understanding good coding practices when dealing with client server architecture.

So whats up with the hype?

To really appreciate JSON its good to understand XML and why an alternative to XML exists. XML is a powerful robust markup language that makes many things that were formerly very difficult much more feesable. One of those things is data interchange between different systems. Data interchange between different systems has always been possible, however up until recent years it has been very difficult because of the lack of a unified protocol. These days most modern languages and DBMSs have XML parsing functions that allow you to grab the data that you need and search and filter your data with Xpath. XML has many uses. Everything from styling to configuration files to web services and site maps. More recently, XML has been used to encapsulate data in AJAX HTTP requests. XML is very powerful in that it is platform independent so you can conceivably transfer data between multiple operating systems, languages, databases, and other systems and sub systems. You can see what XML looks like here (more…)

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’. (more…)

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.

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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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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: (more…)