I love the Google Maps API, it’s fairly easy to use, well documented, has lots of features to tweak and extend beyond the obvious. However, it’s hefty. The initial load with map assets can easily total 300K, and visibly slow down your site especially if you are providing more than one map on a single page. So, to solve these issues I decided to write a thin layer around the Maps API.
I moved my jQuery Class plug-in to GitHub. Not sure what I was thinking when I provided it as a tarball download before. I followed jQuery’s style in the repo, so I have my features as separate source files under src, and a Makefile is used to build complete and minified versions under dist. I am also planning to start using QUnit for unit testing my JavaScript applications, more on that later.
In the past few months, I came across these two jQuery-based plug-ins that use the canvas (or VML, in the case of IE) capabilities of modern browsers to draw charts and graphs. Both seem like they might have legitimate uses, and are definitely fun to play around with. Sparklines provides small inline charts, whereas flot is much more sophisticated and can produce full graphs with zoom functionality.
I like working with JavaScript classes, but I really don’t like the way I have to contruct them. I have been researching a way to clean up this process a few months back, and after reading about how base2 and Prototype.js do it, I stumbled upon John Resig’s Simple JavaScript Inheritance method. It’s simply brilliant, and so easy to turn into a proper jQuery plug-in.
I just read about Eric Florenzano’s programming meme, and it seemed pretty funny. Then I noticed that there is no JavaScript implementation yet - unacceptable! So here it is.
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