I recently decided to go down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn a new client side library. I was interested in learning more about libraries that aimed to have a minimal footprint even at the cost of providing a more modest API. For this site I have simple requirements, and I wanted to see how simple the ‘simple’ abstractions are these days.
I recently re-discovered a powerful, but mostly hidden feature of jQuery. If you’ve used jQuery for any length of time you’ve probably used filter selectors like :input, :visible or :hidden. What you may not know is, it is really simple to add your own filter selectors. The secret lies in $.expr.filters which is an object of filters.
A project I’m working on requires displaying small data driven sparkline charts. The data is a basic set of data showing activity over time.
We use selenium extensively at work for automated acceptance tests. If you’ve never used selenium, it allows you to record and playback browser sessions and create integration tests from the perspective of a browser. Its generally a great tool, and really helps make sure we don’t release broken code. Recently, however I’ve found Selenium can have adverse reactions with jQuery.
I recently read “Clean Code” by Robert Martin an excellent book on writing clear, easy to maintain and well factored code. In it Robert Martin raises the point that methods should do what their names say, shouldn’t have ‘flag arguments’, and should do only one thing. This implies that overloaded methods are out.