Recently in Web Development (February 12 Edition)

Web development is an industry that’s in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday.

In this series, published monthly, we’ll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump!

News and Releases

All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla.

The Developer Community Bickers About Prefixes

Last month played host to glorious drama as developer and vendors started discussing about vendor prefixes. Specifically, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera have stated that they’re going to adopt and style webkit properties in the future.

There is a ton of information to absorb on either side of the argument so here are some links to catch up:

Do You Exclusively Use webkit Prefixes?
Now Vendor Prefixes Have Become a Problem
Call For Action On Vendor Prefixes

Firefox 2012 Roadmap Published

Firefox released their extremely detailed roadmap for the year 2012. In addition to performance improvements and feature additions, there are a bunch of things that I’m looking forward to in the roadmap.

Faster startups, more developer tools and inbuilt PDF viewers? Sign me up!

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Visual Studio Gets a VIM Emulation Layer

Get the best of both worlds — Visual Studio’s robustness with VIM’s spiffy key binds. I’ve been trying this out for the past couple of weeks and it works great!

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Chrome Launches on Android

With the sheer number of mobile devices accessing the internet, it’s no longer feasible to really ignore that segment of users. Google has finally released a version of their popular Chrome browser for the Android operating system. The mobile versions syncs all your information seamlessly, if it helps…

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Django 1.4 Beta 1 Released

With all the noise around Rails and NodeJS, it’s easy to forget that there are other great frameworks still kicking around.

Django is one such framework. And they just released a beta with a lot of new features including improved password hashing, form wizards, IPV6 support, CSRF improvements and much more. Make sure to check out this excellent framework!

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Our Favorite Tools Get Updated

A lot of our favorite web development tools got updated this month — HTML5 Boilerplate and Modernizr being the more visible ones. Unable to hold my excitement, I posted a PSA earlier this month. Make sure to check the link below to find out more.

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Backbone Gets a Bunch of Features and Gets Closer to Version 1

After an almost 9 month hiatus, Backbone introduced a lot of features over this month pushing the version number upto an exciting 0.9.1. I’ve linked you to the changelog below so you can take a look as to what’s changed.

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Token Firefox and SublimeText 2 Updates

Yes, I know. Another month, another Firefox version. We’re at version 10 now with fairly middling changes.

On to more cheerful news, a new beta version of ST2 is out with a nice new icon, better indentation, better auto complete and more. Plus, you’ll now be granted +10 coolness on using ST2. True story.

SublimeText 2 changelog
Firefox 10 changelog

New Kids on the Block

As web developers, the sheer amount of resources we can tap into increases exponentially with time. Here is just a quick look at some recently created resources that deserve your attention — everything from new books to scripts and frameworks.

Psd.js

psd.js is a general purpose file parser for PSD files created in Photoshop. Given a PSD file, it can parse out information such as image size and color modes, image resources, layer info, image contents, etc.

Github Repo

SQLFiddle

SQL Fiddle is a tool for database developers to test out their SQL queries. If you do not know SQL or basic database concepts, this site is not going to be very useful to you.

SQLFiddle

Touchy.js

Touchy.js is a simple light-weight (1.65 kb compressed) JavaScript library for dealing with touch events in the browser. With no dependencies, just add the script to your page and start hacking.

Github Repo

Turn.js

Turn.js is a plugin for jQuery that adds a beautiful transition similar to real pages in a book or magazine. It works in all modern browsers including touch devices.

Github Repo

Pot.js

Pot.js is a JavaScript library that can be performed without causing stress to the UI and the CPU load by using easy loop iteration functions.

Github Repo

StratifiedJS

StratifiedJS extends the JavaScript language with a small number of constructs for concurrent programming. It allows you to express asynchronous control flow in a straightforward sequential style

Introduction to StratifiedJS

Ingrid

Ingrid is a fluid CSS layout system, whose main goal is to reduce the use of classes on individual units and is a bit less obtrusive and bit more fun to reflow for responsive layouts.

Github Repo

Best of the Internet

Often, you’re not really looking for a tutorial as much as you’re looking for a rant, an opinion or the musings of a tired developer or just something cool with absolutely zero real world use. This sections contains links to precisely those — interesting and cool stuff from the developer community.

XaoS.js

A real-time fractal zoomer. Using it is simple: left-click to zoom in, right-click to zoom out.

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“Programmer” is an Overgeneralization

Erik McClure shares his thoughts on the sheer diversity when it comes to programmers. With software engineering exploding in sheer scope and complexity, this is makes for a great insightful read.

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Differences Between JQuery .bind() vs .live() vs .delegate() vs .on()

The all knowing Elijah Manor talks about the differences between each of these jQuery event binding methods. It’s a little dense if you’re newbie but if you’re really looking to grasp the internals of jQuery, this is a must read.

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Prototypes and Inheritance in JavaScript

This post is as old as the pyramids — in internet time but the information inside is still pretty spot on.

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Patterns for Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture

Addy Osmani presents his minibook on effective architecture for JavaScript apps when they reach a non-trivial size. It’s a bit long but definitely worth your time.

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Backbone and Ember

A super quick look at the differences between Backbone and Ember, two JavaScript frameworks vying for your front end MVC needs.

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The Great Web Framework Shootout

On this page you will find benchmark results comparing the performance of a few of the most popular OSS web frameworks in use today.

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Learn Regex the Hard Way

Zed Shaw teaches you how to regex away to development glory in this extensive guide.

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Wrapping Up

Well, that’s about all the major changes that happened in our industry lately.

Do you want us to cover more standard news? A focus on upcoming scripts maybe? Or just more interesting posts and discussions from the community? Let us know in the comments and thank you so much for reading!