Web Info & Tutorials

If you’ve never heard of Really Simple History, it was one of the first bookmarking and browser history implementations available for Ajax applications.

Really Simple History is a lightweight JavaScript library for the management of bookmarking and browser history in Ajax/DHTML applications.

It was originally developed by Brad Neuberg and Brian Dillard recently took over development of Really Simple History and has been working feverishly on getting out a new release for the masses. Today, Brian announced that Really Simple History v0.6 is ready to go and available for download.

Get the full scoop about this release as well as some future enhancement at Brian’s site.

Lars Hansen of Adobe has written Evolutionary Programming and Gradual Typing in ECMAScript 4 which is a tutorial packed with real code for you to diff JS1 and JS2 as it currently stands:

ECMAScript 4 (ES4) provides a range of facilities for evolutionary programming – evolving a program in
stages from a simple script to an ever larger and more reliable software system. The most important facility
for evolutionary programming is the gradual type system; also important are namespaces and packages, union types, generic functions, and reflection.

This tutorial uses a simple library as a running example to illustrate the evolution of a program from the
ES3 “script” stage, via various levels of typing and rigor, to an ES4 package with greater guarantees of
integrity and better performance potential than the original code. We then look at how union types, generic
functions, and reflection can be used to work with a library whose code we can’t modify.

The tutorial uses an example of a browser email system to demonstrate these new features. It takes you step by step through code that evolves to end up looking very JS2-y indeed. You will have to keep an open mind as you look at code filled with classes, namespaces, likes, and more! It is good to see code coming out as part of the conversation.

Peter Laudati, Developer Evangelist from Microsoft, gave a presentation at The Ajax Experience titled