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I have always had trouble with the standard way of testing out AJAX calls with QUnit. There are a number of problems with it. 1) You have to stop and start the tests while waiting for an AJAX response 2) If you don't give a large enough gap, then your test may fail while waiting for an AJAX response. 3) If you have too large a gap, it slows down your tests However, today I found this cool method of dealing with it. http://lostechies.com/johnteague/2009/02/10/another-way-to-test-ajax-methods/ Essentially, you stub out jQuery's $.ajax() method with your own for your tests (as for unit testing, you really just want to test your code around the ajax method, not test jQuery's ajax method). In my own case, I was using $.ajax and not $.getJSON. It took me a little while to work out I had to create a trigger for the success() function rather then callback() as mentioned in the article. var stubbedAjax = function(settings){ settings.beforeSend(); // s...

Just a couple of links today (more details to follow). I found a great reference for JavaScript and jQuery Design Patterns here: http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/ Also, I learned about the Presenter pattern today. We were having a discussion at work about what to do with presentation logic in Rails. On the one hand you don't want it in the controller because you want to keep your controllers thin, on the other hand you don't want it in the models either because it's presentational. You can't put it in the erb because they shouldn't contain logic. Enter the Presenter Pattern: http://donttrustthisguy.com/2008/05/29/using-presenters-in-rails-3/ http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/03/rails-presenter-pattern.html Enjoy your homework!

jQuery is a great JavaScript library which allows web developers to write cross platform code, but some of its syntax looks like it is based more on Ruby than JavaScript. When does a library become a language? So first of all, what is the difference betwen a programming library and a programming language? A programming language is a means by which we (as humans) can give instructions to a computer to get it to do various tasks (algorithms, computations, etc...). They are largely artificial constructs created for human readability which then need to be compiled or interpreted into actual instructions which the computer can then carry out. A compiler turns a program into machine readable instructions ahead of time (compile time) where as an interpreter does so on the fly (runtime). Languages such as C and Java are generally compiled and JavaScript, Perl and Ruby are generally interpreted. While there is no real reason why this has to be the case, these factors normally affect the syntax...

One issue that has come up in using Unobtrusive JavaScript is how do you assign instance specific data to the element. For example, in the old days (pre UJ) you could iterate over a bunch of objects (each with it's own ID) and hard code the ID into the on{Event} attribute i.e. <% for item in items %> <div onclick="someFunction(<%= item.id %>)">Click here to select item</div> <% end %> But in UJ, on{Event} attributes are no longer considered good practice. If only there was a way we could somehow encode the id with the HTML like we could in Flex (Flex supports dynamic attributes on objects). You can assign a dynamic attribute using JavaScript, but putting a script tag into the loop seems very inelegant and against UJ principles. The other way would be to render all the objects in JavaScript first and then re-render them in HTML. This does seem rather wasteful in terms of processing however and full of index dependencies when you want to merge ...