Help on learning Backbone.js

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Just discovered this awesome site called codeschool and they have this section for learning backbone.js

The ui gets you to type in the code and it marks your code as you go. What makes this really really awesome is that you gain experience and level up. Finally someone is capitalizing on those coders who spent years playing RPGs (Final Fantasy was my poison).

It’s a really nice UI and you have the reading material available as you go. All you need to do is type and get the correct answer.

I think i’m going to use this more often :)

Closures

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Today i read about closures in JavaScript. It was curiosity that forced me to look at this and after reading a few posts and examples on stack overflow I think i have it down pat now.

 

I particularly like the post with references to unicorns :)

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This whole curiosity into closures was just to clarify my understanding of what closures were in JavaScript and has actually made me realize why certain things are done in toolkit’s.

Level Up

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Very handy, I’ve been troubled by this at the moment at work, not specifically SAP but similar and this has come in handy.
Thanks

Jürgen Bäurle's avatarSAP / .NET Interoperability

*** NEW! My blog moved to my homepage at http://www.parago.de! ***

The Secure Store Service in SharePoint 2010 replaces the Single Sign-on Shared Service of MOSS 2007 and provides an easy way to map user credentials of external resources like SAP systems to Windows users. During the process of developing SAP interfaces using the very handy ERPConnect library from Theobald Software you have to open a R3 connection with the SAP system using SAP account credentials (username and password).

In most cases you will use a so called technical user with limited access rights to execute or query objects in SAP, but a SAP system saves a lot of sensitive data which cannot all be shown to all users. So, creating a new secure store in SharePoint 2010 to save the SAP user credentials will be the solution. Accessing the secure store from program code is quite simple.

A…

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JavaScript is evolving

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I’ve been playing with JavaScript since I first discovered it in grade 9 of high school. At the time I thought it was awesome, I could change images on a HTML page and make stuff disappear. I was hooked.

I started making little web pages that did nothing. I probably contributed to the large amount of webpages on the Internet that had scrolling marques or flaming gifs and had images that switched to different sized images when you rolled over them. For this I am sorry.

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At university JavaScript was not a commonly talked about language, we learned C / C++ and then moved on to Java. These where heavy lifting languages, they could do anything. I couldn’t do it as easy as I could with JavaScript and HTML, but there was more here.

At the time Java and .NET were on the rise and web applications were still a little young. As I matured I saw JavaScript as more of a scripting language and only used when it was need.

Over time I have became familiar with .NET and saw it as a professional language (don’t hate) and JavaScript remained in the background and only took stage when needed.

Now I have noticed something. More and more technologies are pushing the boundaries of where Javascript can be used. Things like node.js have turned Javascript on it’s head and made me think differently about the language, it can be a server now.

Things like require.js, backbone.js, mustache.js, etc.. all push JavaScript to the realm of being a modularised, testable language that follows an MVC architecture. JQuery UI and ExtJS give you rich UI/UX tools that make your apps pop. No more flaming gifs for me.

At the moment I’m hacking together an app that utilises JQuery, mustache and backbone and require. Built with node and CouchApp and pushed to CouchDB, furthermore I am developing it on Cloud 9 IDE. All bar CouchDB are based on JavaScript (As far as I know from what I have read), that’s end to end development in the cloud. To me JavaScript is becoming the language of the Internet.

mustache jsIts like JavaScript is that girl in high school that you hung out with and did stuff with but never got serious with her, she had potential but you were young and naive and never saw it. You grew apart over the years and then suddenly at a conference in Capital City you see her again and POW you are stunned at her change. She is so much cooler than you ever knew…. I think I’m getting carried away.

The point is JavaScript with all it’s fancy prototyping is evolving and I feel like there is a new wave of frameworks that are going to become the norm. Its not going to replace things like Java, PHP, .NET, etc. but I think the convenience and ease that these toolkits create will be big attraction for developers.

Granted it isn’t there yet, things like Unit Testing need a bit of work but in any case I think its an exciting time.

Single Page Apps

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I mentioned in a previous post about single page apps and how Mikito Takada put the idea of views being objects and not templates in my head. Well I thought I would share the link that very briefly mentions this and a few other concepts. The video is called Adventures in Single Page Apps.

Takada explains how the traditional world of MVC based applications doesn’t entirely fit the bill for the single page app world when it comes to code reuse and testing. He introduces a few concepts here that are very interesting and make sense to me but I need to read a bit more into this to see if it’s practical.

I might also add this video is in the realm of ajax based web applications with heavy use of Javascript and Javascript based frameworks like node.js and backbone.js.

Its an interesting video and some of what is talked about make sense, just some more investigation on practicality needs to done in my view.

Anyhoo enjoy.