skip the boring parts
The ff javascript library is now available in the version 1.11 which is a small maintainance update to version 1.1
Changes are:
See the documentation for the ff.extend.
Links:
After some more work on it, I am proud to announce the version 1.1 of the ff javascript library. It includes various bug-fixes ( ff.dom.append , various Internet Explorer compatibility fixes especially in the DOM builder) and some more functions in ff.dom and ff.style. The ffjs documentation moved to a new location. It includes a lot more documentation and 2 examples. I may add some more examples in the future.
One problem when trying to do “The Right Thing ™” and separate your webdesign into different layers is what to do when you need additional information to transform your nicely id and class annotated DOM nodes into fancy, javascript-enabled goodness:
Where do you store that information? How do you associate it to the DOM nodes? I will present three approaches to this problem..
The first method is relatively straight-forward: You add ids or classes to your DOM nodes. Then you include a dynamically generated javascript library in your document.
The problem with this is that the generated javascript library is requested in a new request which makes it nescessary to provide this request with the nescessary context to generate it. You also need to write code which finds your DOM nodes and finds the data from the included javascript library and associates both. You also walk over the server side data twice: Once to generate the DOM nodes and once to create the javascript library.
The second approach is to compromise a little on the separation ideal and render the javascript data from the first method right into the page source.
You don’t need to carry the context for the data into a second request for the javascript library, but you still need to wak the data twice on the server side, you still need to associate the DOM nodes to the data, and you have a big block of js data in the head section of your document.
I thought about a way to directly associate the DOM with additional data. JSON seemed to be a good format to store the data. At first I thought about using a custom attribute but I did not like the idea of invalid HTML markup. Then I got another idea:
Why not use the event handlers? Something like
<a href="/no_js" onclick="return { foo: 'extra', bar: 1};">Link</a>
works pretty well. It is totally valid HTML, the onclick contains valid javascript code which can also be easily parsed by other tools. (It is basically just a JSON string wrapped with a “return […] ;” ) When javascript is disabled, the link just executes normally and can provide non-javascript functionality. The data can be retrieved by executing “var data=linkNode.onclick();”. “But what about the fake event handler?” you might ask. Well.. if someone clicks on the unmodified link in a javascript enabled browser: nothing happens. The script just returns some data and does nothing else. The return code will be ignored by the browser environment due to this age-old, pre-DOM standard of canceling the event if the handler returns false and just going on if it returns true — since the data is something it evaluates to true so it’s just ignored.
On the server side things get much easier. Not only does no context need to be carried into another request but you also only need to walk over the data once. You can ouput the HTML and the additional javascript data into the same part of the document.
I admit that this approach bends the rules of separation a little, but in my opinion that’s ok.
One of the most important practices when developing complex web applications is to seperate them into different layers. This applies to the server side as well as to the client side of things. On the client side the separation usually is:
While this wisdom is very much common place for the first two layers, many people still don’t do the Behaviour layer correctly. There are several important points to this:
Links:
I often use the dojo javascript compressor system which is a very nice way to reduce the site of larger js libs. It uses the Rhino javascript interpreter to reduce the size of all local variables and removes all unessecary spaces and comments — but most importantly it keeps the external API of a javascript lib like it is.
A minor problem with that was that I like to use Internet Explorer specific conditional compilation to handle Internet Explorer’s non-standard js garbage. (I would really like to be able to fully ignore IE, but ignoring 70% of all Internet users is not really going to please my clients).
Since the compressor removes all comments from the js files it also removes conditional code sections. There are plans to make the compressor keep them but they’re postponed until at least dojo 0.4.
So for now I wrote myself a little bash script that replaces the conditional comments with javascript expressions that are not removed, compresses the js file and reinserts the conditional comments.
I have tested this only on linux but you should also be able to use it under OS-X or under cygwin for Windows.
Using this script
/* Javascript compression Test */alert("Js compression test");
function foo(arg)
{
var local=arg;
}
/*@cc_on @*/
/*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5)
alert("You are using Internet Explorer 5+");
function bar(arg)
{
var localIE=arg;
}
@end @*/
is compressed to
alert("Js compression test");
function foo(_1){
var _2=_1;
}
/*@cc_on @*/
/*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5)
alert("You are using Internet Explorer 5+");
function bar(_3){
var _4=_3;
}
@end @*/
That does not seem that much for this small example, but for larger libs the reduction is not that bad. The current version of my ff js lib e.g. compresses from 12005 bytes to 7644 bytes (36% reduction).
Update: corrected custom_rhino.jar URL