Sometimes a single sentence in a specification can balloon into a task as daunting as most of the other sentences put together. This is the story of one such sentence.
If ever a feature of JavaScript was considered harmful, it’s eval(). It’s so commonly abused that if I’m interviewing a JS web developer, I usually ask something along the lines of “what is eval(), and why shouldn’t you use it”. It’s so commonly abused that Yahoo JavaScript architect Douglas Cronkford considers it “evil”, and his JavaScript style checker JSLint reports use of it as an error.
People dislike eval() because it’s perceived to be slow and insecure. In this article I describe a way to use eval() to make your application faster.
Continue reading eval() considered useful: code generation in JavaScript
Community translations:
Animator.js was a library I wrote back in 2006 to handle animation on web pages. For a time it was quite ahead of the curve: It was the first library to feature CSS morphing - the ability to smoothly transition between two styles defined as CSS classes.
The world of JavaScript has moved on a lot since then. Animator.js has now been incorporated into most of the major JavaScript frameworks, either by directly porting the code (Animator.js is released under a BSD license that allows people to do this) or by borrowing the techniques. In particular, CSS animations produce better results and use less processor power. For a modern library that exposes CSS animations through a similar API, I recommend jQuery.Transit.
I'm keeping this page up here for historical interest, because it's written in a tutorial style that will be appropriate if you want to learn how to create programatic animation in any language.
Thanks to Tim Stone, Kaspar Fischer, Clint Priest and other developers who contributed feedback and features.
Continue reading Animator.js: JavaScript animation library