In preparing for the final release of Fluid Infusion 0.6 (as of writing, we are at “Bug Parade” stage, leading to code freeze for Monday), we found ourselves with the disagreeable requirement to make some incompatible API changes to a part of the framework. Not only why we had to do this, but what we [...]

There are many ways of finding things in the DOM - sometimes, many ways of evaluating apparently the same expression. For example, CSS and JQuery allow you to find elements by id, using an expression of the form
var myElement=$(”#my-element-id”);
as well as the apparently equivalent expression
var myElement=$(”[id=my-element-id]“);
However, these expressions are different in [...]

In the interests of aiming towards slightly more bite-sized blog postings, I thought I would share with you some possibly unsuspected gems in a favorite JQuery method I kicked over recently.
Basic extending
jQuery.extend is more commonly seen as part of plugin code - the jQuery plugin model simply works by “extension” of the jQuery object itself [...]

This posting will be about the different styles of creating “components” or “objects” in Javascript, and which styles Fluid is planning to recommend and in what contexts.
Javascript has inherited an “infusion” of “object-oriented” features grafted at the last moment on its fairly minimal and clear (LISP-inspired) baseline. The resulting language simply has too many ways [...]

Following up on Antranig’s recent post about performance, I’d like to address the issue of code design and its relationship to performance. Antranig’s article is very comprehensive and well-considered, and it provides us with a number of guidelines for balancing the tradeoffs between code quality and speed. However, I was surprised that he didn’t remind [...]

Recently, I expressed to Colin the sense of “disorientation” every Java (or other “traditional”) programmer must feel at diving into the client side and trying to write idiomatic, performant code. Every reasonable coder quickly develops a “gut” feeling for the costs (both in design, and resources) for the various primitives they have at their disposal. [...]

We’re really close to putting out Fluid Infusion 0.3. It’ll be ready in a few days, and is shaping up to be a pretty solid release. In addition to a preview version of the Uploader, we’ve really improved the user experience and functionality of the Reorderer. We’ve added sortable layouts, customizable drag-and-drop interactions, and support [...]

For some time now, I’ve wanted to update everyone on Fluid’s recommendations regarding JavaScript toolkits. We’ve done a lot of research and evaluation of various open source products, and have chosen jQuery as our favoured toolkit. We think the accessibility plugins and utilities we’ve been writing with jQuery will be useful to a wide range [...]

In follow up to Simon’s recent posting about the intricacies of cross-browser support for the tabindex attribute, I’ve written a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to get, set, and check for the presence of tabindex values.
Getting the Source Code
The source code is currently available in the Fluid Project SVN, and will be included in [...]

Two weeks ago we held the first Fluid Summit meeting here in Toronto. It was a resounding success, and I’d like to thank everyone who attended and brought their ideas and proposals to the table. We had a very full week of planning, coding, and designing. Members of the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali [...]