Saturday, August 22, 2009
Attending
JSConf 2009 was a real eye-opener for me: there are a lot of people using JavaScript in really interesting ways to do phenomenal things inside and outside of the browser. Projects like Phonegap, Titanium, CouchDB, SproutCore, and Cappuccino have the potential to transform many aspects of computing or at least point the way to some new paradigms.
To keep the conversation going, this led me to propose one talk and one panel for SXSW 2010:
Building Rich Web Apps with SproutCoreThe JavaScript Applications RenaissanceIf those sound intriguing, please consider voting at the above links, or better yet leave a comment expressing your support.
There are several other JavaScript related talks that I hope you will check out as well:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/4/q:javascriptLabels: Javascript, sproutcore, sxsw
Monday, April 27, 2009
On Saturday I gave an "Introduction to SproutCore" talk at
JSConf, the world's first all-JavaScript conference. It was a great conference and highly recommended. Videos will be posted over the next several weeks. For now, for those interested, my slides are below.
Labels: Javascript, jsconf, sproutcore
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I've been working on a really cool new project, to be announced soon, where I've built a Rails-based web app that has two interfaces: one for humans to interact with inside of a browser, and a RESTful API for browser plugins to interact with via GETs and POSTs. We want people to be able to interact with our site while visiting other sites.
I had seen other Firefox plugins that were click-to-install, but I had a hard time figuring out how to make it work for our plugin. Firefox users were having to "Save Link As.." and open the downloaded .xpi file manually. Very old-fashioned. So here's a quick note to help future Mozilla or Firefox developers who need to create a click-to-install plugin:
1) It's all done through Javascript, so anyone without Javascript will have to install your plugin the old-fashioned way. The Mozilla site documents the API call you need to make.
2) I'm a huge proponent of unobtrusive javascript (UJS), which I learned by using Dan Webb's excellent LowPro framework. Thus I wanted to make sure that the click-to-install javascript was offered as a progressive enhancement to the normal HTML links we provided. That way, everyone could have a link to the plugin file itself for manual installation, but people with Javascript could enjoy click-to-install.
In this part of the site, we weren't using any other Javascript libraries, so it seemed like overkill to include Prototype and LowPro just for this one effect. So it was a great chance to learn how to roll my own UJS without library support. I whipped up a quick UJS click-to-install technique following inspiration from this presentation. Here's what I came up with:
<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
function doXPITrigger() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return false;
var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i < links.length; i++) {
if (links[i].className.match("firefox")) {
links[i].onclick = function() {
xpi={'Awesome New Project Toolbar':'/downloads/awesome_project.xpi'};
InstallTrigger.install(xpi);
return false;
}
}
}
}
window.onload = doXPITrigger
//]]>
3) I've seen other advice recommending you configure your web server to recognize the .xpi mimetype appropriately. I did this but it didn't make much difference in my case. Still, it's probably worth doing. I added this line to our Apache config:
AddType application/x-xpinstall .xpi
Labels: firefox, Javascript, rails
