webddr

Javascript has a special word: “this”. It’s hard for me to succinctly define what “this” is all about but, by default, “this” is the object to which the current method belongs. It allows objects to refer to themselves within their methods as they would otherwise have no means to do so. This becomes important when you create children objects and have numerous instances of that object; how else could the method of an object refer to itself? (more)

If you think of the tasks that we want to accomplish in JavaScript strictly in terms of “get stuff on the page and do stuff to it” then jQuery is probably the best choice. It excels at offering a very expressive system for describing behavior on the page in a way that doesn’t feel like programming sometimes. You can still use the rest of JavaScript to do what you want to do, but if you’re focused on the DOM – changing CSS properties, animating things, fetching content via AJAX, etc – most of what you’ll end up writing will be covered by jQuery, and what isn’t will likely be plain-old JavaScript. (more)

Part of making this choice is asking what you want to do with JavaScript. Let’s consider vanilla JavaScript. No framework; just plain old JS. JavaScript gives you native objects like Strings, Numbers, Functions, Arrays, Dates, Regular Expressions, and more. JavaScript also gives you an inheritance model – a somewhat esoteric model called prototypal inheritance (which I’ll talk about more later). (more)

First, jQuery is, by and large, easier to learn. It has an almost colloquial style that almost doesn’t feel like programming. If all you want is to get something working quickly without learning JavaScript, jQuery is probably a better choice for you. It’s not that MooTools can’t help you accomplish the same things, but I’ll admit that MooTools can be a little harder to get the hang of if you’re new to JavaScript and also that there are just a lot of resources out there to help you learn jQuery – more than there are for MooTools at least. (more)

If you go to the jQuery site, here’s what it says at the top of the page:

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. (more)

Little doubt remains that the Stuxnet worm represents one of the most sophisticated digital attacks on critical infrastructure systems that cybersecurity researchers have ever seen. The motives of whoever launched that attack is a far murkier question–but a mounting stack of theories is starting to point to a targeted sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities. (more)

The Chinese government Tuesday criticized Google for being “totally wrong” by stopping censoring its Chinese-language search results, while reaffirming that the foreign investment environment will not be affected in China, a ready made reaction after two months of tension sparked by the search engine’s pullout threat.

Surveys showed that the majority of China’s Web users is not much affected by Google’s decision to reroute searches to its Hong Kong-based site. (more)