Web development is an industry that's in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday.
In this series, published monthly, we'll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump!
News and Releases
All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla.
jQuery Now Runs on Every Second Website
You could argue, successfully, that jQuery ushered in an era of JavaScript awareness and dominance. Be it the developer friendly, CSS selector-esque DOM querying or the mind boggling number of plugins and the resulting ecosystem that sprung around it, jQuery has been adopted a massive portion of the web.
This recent statistic tells us that jQuery now runs on every other website. Amazing, considering it's been roughly seven years since its inception. And it's even more amazing considering the sheer number of websites out there!
Textmate Goes Open Source
In the recent deluge of editors, IDEs and cloud whamathingies, it's safe to say that TextMate has lost a lot of mind share. Well, its developers have just gone ahead and open sourced the entire thing.
Of course, it's all still OS X only so it's a bit of a bummer for us Windows fans but hey, a win is a win regardless of the platform you're rooting for. Mac aficionados, hit the Github repo below.
jQuery Hits Version 1.8
The jQuery juggernaut rolls on ahead as version 1.8 is now live. Some new features to look forward to include automatic CSS prefixing, a revamped animation system, a rewrite of the Sizzle selector engine and much more!
Firefox 15 is Upon Us
Another month, another major version of Firefox. I wouldn't have mentioned this update here but it ships with support for SPDY [look it up!], a ton of WebGL improvements and a brand new interactive JavaScript debugger.
Phusion Passenger Enterprise Released
To directly quote their site: "Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby and Python web applications. It has a strong focus on ease of use, stability and performance. Phusion Passenger is built on top of tried-and-true, battle-hardened Unix technologies, yet at the same time introduces innovations not found in most traditional Unix servers."
While it may not be a well known name elsewhere, it definitely is in the Ruby ecosystem, specially Rails. This enterprise versions aims to introduce a lot more features than the free version but it's not clear as to what they'll be. Guess we'll have to wait and watch!
Bootstrap 2.1.0 Released
Let's face it: everyone loves Bootstrap. This huge updates ships with new documentation, numerous bug fixes, block leve buttons, brand new typography and tons more. Make sure to hit the change log below.
PHP Gets Some Minor Improvements
Forever the nerd, I was trolling through the PHP change log page when I found out that both the 5.3.x and 5.4.x branches received some minor improvements and bug fixes.
My experience with computing has taught me that if it says segfault somewhere, you better darn pay attention to it!
Neil Armstrong Passes Away at 82
I'm completely aware this has nothing to do with web development but this man deserves a mention and a moment of silence.
"I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream."
- Neil Armstrong
New Kids on the Block
As web developers, the sheer amount of resources we can tap into increases exponentially with time. Here is just a quick look at some recently created resources that deserve your attention -- everything from new books to scripts and frameworks.
Vanilla JS
Vanilla JS is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications.
Toro
Toro is a PHP router for developing RESTful web applications and APIs. It is designed for minimalists who want to get work done.
normalize.css
Normalize.css is a customisable CSS file that makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. We researched the differences between default browser styles in order to precisely target only the styles that need normalizing.
t.js
t.js is a simple solution to interpolating values in an html string for insertion into the DOM via innerHTML.
Piecon
Pie charts in your favicon! A tiny javascript library for dynamically generating progress pie charts in your favicons.
Github.js
Github.js provides a minimal higher-level wrapper around git's plumbing commands, exposing an API for manipulating GitHub repositories on the file level. It is being developed in the context of Prose, a content editor for GitHub.
reveal.js
reveal.js comes with a broad range of features including nested slides, markdown contents, PDF export, speaker notes and a JavaScript API. It's best viewed in a browser with support for CSS 3D transforms but fallbacks are available to make sure your presentation can still be viewed elsewhere.
prism
Prism is a new lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind. It’s a spin-off from Dabblet and is tested there daily by thousands.
Best of the Internet
Often, you're not really looking for a tutorial as much as you're looking for a rant, an opinion or the musings of a tired developer or just something cool with absolutely zero real world use. This sections contains links to precisely those -- interesting and cool stuff from the developer community.
Rich JavaScript Applications – the Seven Frameworks
The aim of the article is to take the seven top JavaScript frameworks/libraries for single-page and rich JavaScript applications — AngularJS, Backbone, Batman, CanJS, Ember, Meteor, Knockout, Spine — get the creators of all of them in one location, and compare the technologies head to head.
Break Apart Your Backbone.js Render Methods
A fairly in-depth look at Backbone's Render method. Lots of insights if you're a JavaScript developer.
REST – Epic Semantic Fail
Is your REST implementation good or not? Find out here!
Teaching my 10 year old niece how to program.
A great read regardless of whether you have an affectionate underling to teach your craft to.
Wrapping Up
Well, that's about all the major changes that happened in our industry lately.
Do you want us to cover more standard news? A focus on upcoming scripts maybe? Or just more interesting posts and discussions from the community? Let us know in the comments and thank you so much for reading!
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