Recently in Web Development (May 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.

Chrome Becomes the Most Popular Browser in the World

In retrospect, I guess it was just a matter of time. Chrome is now the most used browser in the world followed by Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Chrome has been on the war path ever since its inception and even though it still lags behind Firefox in Europe and Africa or behind IE in Asia, I’m sure it’s not going anywhere but up in the future.

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Facebook Introduces the App Center

Yes, we have one more entry into the already crowded apps marketplace. Facebook is the latest entrant with its ‘App Center’ aimed at social apps.

It’s not a pure marketplace, per se, though — if an app requires installation, the user will be redirected to the respective App Store or Google Play page. Any way, there’s a lot more information in the link below so make sure to give it a read.

Oh, and I almost forgot. For those who have been living under a rock this past month, Facebook IPO’ed this month amidst stratospheric numbers and hype. The result of a bubble or an entire paradigm shift? We’ll know soon enough.

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To Code or Not to Code. That’s the Question

Learning to code has been all the rage lately with moms to mayors getting on the bandwagon.

Jeff Atwood, one of the people behind the enormousely useful Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange sites, posted a controversial piece imploring people not not to code.

It’s a surprising position coming from Jeff which is why there were a lot of follow up articles exploring the position. I’ve linked the parent article as well as a few interesting follow ups so read on!

Please Don’t Learn to Code
Please Learn to Code
So You Want to be a Programmer

GitHub for Windows. Finally

Github, after churning out a version for my fruity brethren long back, is finally out with a version for Windows. To sweeten the deal, it seems to be rocking the sweet Metro look.

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Coda 2 and Diet Coda Out.

Coda has been one of the staple IDEs for web devs everywhere but I’m sure no one can argue it’s not showing its age. Panic has finally launched the much awaited Coda 2 as well as Diet Coda for the iPad.

The new version ships with a lot of features include better code folding, a better UI, Git integration and much more. Not everything is rosy though. Users used to ST2 power and plugins, like our very own Jeffrey, don’t seem to be smitten by it.

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Jeffrey’s review

PHP Goes Through a Round of Updates

PHP has quietly gone from version 5.4.1 to 5.4.3 through the month of May. While most are just mundane bug fixes, there are a few security patches that caters to Apache and nginx owners so make sure to update as quickly as possible.

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Some JavaScript Hackers Get Carried Away

Some JavaScript authors have started a Kickstarter campaing for a .js top level domain. As big a JavaScript lover I am, I can’t help but ask why. Do we really need a TLD for just JavaScript projects? Where does the madness end? .php? .css? .html? Oh, right…

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A Few Big PHP Framework [Re]Hit the Scene

Yeah, yeah, new frameworks are introduced probably every second but these two are a bit special. To steal their marketing:

“React is a platform built on PHP for easily building fast, scalable network applications. React uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.”

“I’m sure many of you have checked out Laravel 3 already, but if you haven’t here’s some of the highlights: bundles, migrations, database schema builder, command line interface, integrated unit testing and events.”

React
Laravel

Linus Torvalds Chews Out Github

Linus is famous for being outspoken and blunt. This time Github fell into the crosshairs. The reason for his anger? Github’s pull request module. There’s a ton of hilarity and drama in the thread below so make sure to give it a read.

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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.

Doppio

Doppio is a project to get Java running in the browser without any plug-ins. Right now it comprises a fairly complete VM and an implementation of the javap bytecode disassembler.

Github Repo

Fixie.js

Fixie.js is an open source tool that automatically adds filler content to HTML documents.

Github Repo

Backbone.offline

The primary task for this library was to create web-app which can work standalone. Backbone.offline replaces the module Backbone.sync to Offline.sync and does not add any additional logic to the app. At the same time, it does not add anything new to other Backbone modules

Github Repo

Knob

jQuery Knob is canvas based and supports touch, mousewheel and keyboad input.

Github Repo

jQuery Super Labels

This plugin was born out of the need to use the label-over-field method for forms I was working on. There are other plugins out there that do pretty much the same thing, but none of them had the – for lack of a better word – sexiness that I was looking for. This implementation makes the label slide across the field when gaining focus and fade out when a value is entered.

Github Repo

LLJS: Low-Level JavaScript

LLJS (formerly known as *JS) is a typed dialect of JavaScript that offers a C-like type system with manual memory management. It compiles to JavaScript and lets you write memory-efficient and GC pause-free code less painfully, in short, LLJS is the bastard child of JavaScript and C.

Github Repo

Flotr2

Graphs and Charts for Canvas in JavaScript.

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.

Why Postgres

An excellent look into why Postgres is incredibly awesome. Make sure to read the follow up post here.

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UTF-8 Everywhere

Know zilch about character encoding? This needs to be read!

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Spine.js vs Backbone.js

A great read on the differences between the Spine and Backbone frameworks.

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OO JS in 15mins or Less

Properties, methods, and the elusive this oh my whats a developer to do? Read this guide to writing elegant object oriented (OO) JavaScript I respond!

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Multiple var statements in JavaScript, not superfluous

Ben Alman talks about JavaScript and multiple var statements.

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(Some) ORM Haters Do Get It

A well written article on why the author isn’t a big fan of ORMs.

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Crockford Hates on JSON Comments

Mix Crockford and non-standard use of his stuff and this will happen…

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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!