erik's weblog

Just like a lot of other people I have a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. I love how expressive it is and I love that it runs everywhere but there are also some things where the languages falls very short. The gripe of the day is how JS makes reflection part of the everyday programming flow. [...]

Another thing that always been bothering me about OOP in JS is that calling super is such a pain. Some libraries do ugly hacks like checking the source (by calling toString on their constructor and method function objects) and then wrap the original function in another function that encapsulates a variable called super. Other libraries [...]

Update: This is flawed. See details at the end. This post was inspired by a post that Robert Nyman wrote a while back. At the same time I was thinking about how to achieve private fields without the memory issues. JavaScript does not have private members as understood by a lot of other object oriented programming [...]

One of my top feature request for IE8 was for it to support box-sizing. I’m happy to see that IE8 does support box-sizing although it has a annoying quirk. The DOM property name is not correct. The rule for translating CSS property names to DOM property names is to replace a dash followed by a [...]

The Good Attribute handling in the DOM is finally working. MS said that this was one of the hardest things to fix and yet they did it. hashchange events simplify history management. I wish they implemented more of the HTML5 proposals when it comes to history state management but getting an event when the hash [...]

[Revised to not sound as nagging as I always sound] The JScript 5.7 patch is now being pushed to an IE6 computer near you… IE6 uses Jscript 5.6 which has some design flaws when it comes to garbage collection. This is just a small issue for small applications but it is a large issue for [...]

My favorite text editor of all time is ActiveState Komodo. I used to use the full/pro version of this but since I was too lazy to buy it so I kept redownloading the trial version every month. A while back ActiveState released a free version of the editor called Komodo Edit. Komodo Edit has almost [...]

We finally got our act together and squashed some long standing bugs. This is the first bug fix release since we initially release ExCanvas over a year ago. Support for sub pixel rendering Crop content if painting outside the canvas initElement now returns a reference to the fixed element Fixes to arc Printing support Implement [...]

I guess you all heard that MacromediaAdobe donated their JIT compiler version of JavaScript to Mozilla. Tamarin is the JIT for Action Script 3 (AS3) which is a version of ECMAScript 3rd Edition. Using a JIT should improvement of JavaScript by at least 10x. This is of course very good news. However a lot of [...]

Andrew Dupont wrote an excellent post explaining why using Array for maps/hashes/asssociative arrays are considered harmful. If you use Arrays for hashes in JavaScript you should be ashamed of yourself