Social networking is one of the biggest parts of the famed (or infamous) Web 2.0. Giving power to the people, having people add value to your product, that’s what Web 2.0 is about…or so I keep hearing. This certainly started out as true. In the beginning there was Friendster, and it was good. But it... […]

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it. ECMA-262 is the specification for ECMAScript, which is the core of JavaScript, providing syntax, operators, keywords, default objects, and more. The third edition of ECMA-262 is the one implemented by almost all browser vendors (though to varying degrees... […]

Back at the Rich Web Experience, I helped lead a “birds of a feather” group discussion on JavaScript. In that discussion, someone called me a JavaScript expert. I quickly explained that I don’t like being called an expert because it implies that I know everything about JavaScript, which I don’t. I then went on to... […]

Well, I’ve just completed my first external conference, Rich Web Experience, and had a great time. I’m a bit exhausted from all the activity the past few days, but I’m very glad that I went and participated. One of the cool things about this conference is that we got evaluations from the session attendees. I... […]

Just wrapped up the first day of the Rich Web Experience which wound up with a discussion between Stuart Halloway, Alex Russell, and myself about Google Web Toolkit. I’ve never been a fan of treating JavaScript like Assembly or some other low-level language, as if it’s something to be compiled down to versus truly understanding,... […]

I’m home a bit early from the Rich Web Experience today, having sat through only two presentations. I’m exhausted, after having gotten home past midnight last night, and given that my talk tomorrow is at 8:30am, I thought it wise to get home and get to sleep early. I sat through Bill Scott‘s presentation on... […]

The current leader in Internet search is undoubtedly Google. Pretty much anyone else who wants to enter the search engine market is trying to figure out a way to beat Google. Maybe it’s the algorithm or the content that people really want? No one knows for sure. The problem with trying to beat Google is... […]

It’s almost here. The Rich Web Experience is just about a week away and I’m getting pretty excited. I’ve just finished uploading my slides for my two presentations and I really can’t wait to get started. It’s my first external conference so I’m looking forward to…well…pretty much everything about it. To make things a bit... […]

As a follow-up to my last post, I’ve devised a new experiment to test the relative speed of accessing global variables versus accessing local variables. Several commenters correctly pointed out that my first experiment was flawed due to the repeated variable initialization in the local variable test case. I clearly forgot to take into account... […]

For years, I’ve heard that local variables in JavaScript are faster than global variables when used inside of functions. Logically, this always made sense to me: the longer the scope chain the longer it would take to look up the chain and find a particular variable. If the variable was local, however, the search would... […]