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Favourable Reception for Coherent

I recently announced the upcoming release of Coherent 1.0 and I’ve been very pleased by the positive reception the library has received.

Lots of folks have come out of the woodwork to either say they’ve been looking for something like this for ages. I guess there are more fans of the Apple development model than I thought. And obviously a lot of us build Web applications either for a living or in our spare time.

As I’ve been working on some features I’ve planned for 1.1, I’ve run across some strange problems with selectors which seems to tie into John Resig’s recent blog post about selectors.

Greatest Hits

Spooky Code or How to Make Animations Run Smoother

So I’ve been thinking about JavaScript performance, because I’m hoping to make my animations run smoother. The actual animation steps (changing position, opacity, or size of a node) can’t be improved by anyone other than the browser vendor. So what can I do to optimise my code and allow me to get more raw horsepower out of the same browser?

Simple Animation

Most JavaScript libraries support some animation of one variety or another. Nothing new there. I’d like to share the animation framework I’ve been developing for my HTML Bindings library. It builds on some of the lessons I’ve learned about developing animations for the iPhone.

Read Simple Animation »

Going Global

So far, the most popular posts I’ve written (if you discount the rant about syncing my mobile phone on Windows) are the two about getting dynamically loaded JavaScript code to execute in the global context.

Read Going Global »

Demo Goodness

Bindings that Flickr

A long time ago, I started writing a port of Apple’s Cocoa Bindings to JavaScript and HTML. I finally sat down and built a little application that demonstrates some of the capabilities of the Bindings library.

In this demo, enter your flickr username (mine is jeffwatkins). The Flickr controllers are based on the AjaxController which will fetch JavaScript objects from a specified URL (in this case my Flickr proxy PHP script). Because of the magic of Bindings, the whole UI will update without you having to write a single line of code.

You’re welcome to take a look at the source of the Bindings library in subversion. In addition to making UI development with JavaScript and HTML a true pleasure, there’s a dynamic script loading facility similar to that provided by Dojo. Of course there are some other goodies packed in there — including the animation code I’ve been working on.

The Demo

About nerd

You’re reading Jeff Watkins’ thoughts about Web application design and development with a little bit of technology ranting thrown in for free.

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Favourable Reception for Coherent

I recently announced the upcoming release of Coherent 1.0 and I’ve been very pleased by the positive reception the library has received.Lots of folks have come out of the woodwork to either say they’ve been looking for something like this for ages. I guess there are more fans of the Apple development model than I [...]
New Tutorial on Writing Widgets

As the release of Coherent looms nearer, I’ve been encouraged to start writing some documentation. My first effort is up: Writing a Widget. This tutorial takes you through creating a widget using Coherent starting with raw mark up and ending with a functional (if simple) widget. Thanks to some great feedback (and encouragement) from Neil [...]
Automatic Change Notifications in Coherent

I’ve written a little bit about an exciting new feature in the Coherent library: automatic change notifications. In short, this reduces the amount of code you need to write and if your application only needs to support a Class A browser (like Safari 3 or Firefox), you can rely on JavaScript’s support for property getter/setter [...]