The Bungee Blog

I’ve just been notified the Japanese translation of The Bungee Book made it out to shelves on July 28. It’s wonderful to see the reach of the book broaden like that. And the cover is rather cool, too:

I also hear Chinese and Korean editions should hit the shelves pretty soon. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

(cross-posted from the official Prototype blog)

Prototype Core is happy to announce the first Prototype Developer Day! The Prototype Developer Day is going to be a recurring event bringing together Prototype Core members and users from the Prototype community to share experiences, offer insight into what’s coming up, and discuss topics like contribution, support, and the Prototype ecosystem. If you’re big on Prototype, you cannot miss this!

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One size does not necessarily fit all. Although it is my fervent hope that the very vast majority of the book’s readers found it to their liking and very useful to their endeavors, it never hurts to cross multiple approaches in order to get a better understanding of a topic.

Which is why I couldn’t be silent on the recent release of fellow Prototype Core member Andrew Dupont’s book, Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us. Amazon has Search-Inside already, and you can grab a free chapter at Ajaxian.

You’ll notice Amazon pairs Andrew’s book and mine more often then not

Andrew’s a superb Prototype expert, one of the four people, actually, having commit rights to Prototype’s repository. He’s extremely active (far more than I these days, I’m afraid) and I have every confidence his book is very useful. Check it out!

I’m delighted to report that my article in renowned A List Apart just went out, and it covers a pretty tricky aspect of JavaScript often misunderstood or poorly known: binding.

Head over to ALA and enjoy: Getting Out of Binding Situations in JavaScript.

Get it now. I’m serious. YSlow’s there, Firebug 1.2 beta’s there, Web Developer Toolbar’s there, and it just kicks the living crap out of Firefox 2 for performance, not to mention all the cool dev-oriented stuff like more advanced JS, better extension stuff, better <canvas>, better SVG, better support for cutting-edge standards, and the like.

Get it now. Get it today.

A few days ago, an astute reader of the book, Bharat Ruparel, requested an example of multiple-update autocompletion on the book’s forums. I thought it would make for a nice demo page and a post here, so here you go, Bharat.

The main idea behind autocompletion with script.aculo.us is that the possible results are sent as a <ul>/<li> list, one list item per result, and the full textual contents of an item (including line breaks and whitespace), except whatever contents sits inside an element with a CSS class named “informal,” are extracted to provide the completed text.

This behavior can be altered, however, mainly through two means:

• Using the select option to provide a CSS class name marking which textual contents to use (any other textual contents will be ignored)
• Providing a custom extraction logic in addition to the default one through the afterUpdateElement callback.

Both these are discussed in the book (chapter 16, which is 20 pages), but the callback approach isn’t demonstrated in-depth. For this post, I prepared a detailed demo page that I invite you all to go through. It contains detailed explanative material around each step, from the most basic call to the full-fledged one, and tries to demonstrate the snags you can hit and how to achieve more advanced completion.

Check out the full demo page!

I hope this helps, and perhaps even provides a few of you with that “Aha!” moment I cherish.

Cheers,

A reader just brought an issue with the book’s Builder demo (chapter 17) to my attention.

The code that ships with the demo essentially grabs code pieces from the page itself, where they are displayed in table cells, to run this code live and display its result. In doing so, it attempted to go the extra mile and strip single-line comments from the code before eval‘ing it; it isn’t mandatory, it just felt cleaner at the time.

However, the regular expression used b0rks on IE7. I’m surprised nobody alerted me to that in almost 7 months since the book’s final release…

To get it to work in IE7, simply strip the clean-up line from the code. That’s the following line:

code = code.replace(/^\s*\/\/.*$/mg, '');

This will work just fine on all browsers now.

Thanks to Bharat for the heads up!

Welcome to this sixth installment of Neuron Workout Solutions™, a series that answers the questions and challenges at the end of many chapters in the book. Boy, is this installment overdue. I’ve been meaning to write it for weeks, but life just didn’t seem to agree. Today we’ll address the challenges closing chapter 12: Effects. And with this, we open up the Neuron Workouts for the script.aculo.us part of the book.

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The original 5,000 paper copies are just about sold out, and channels keep asking for more! So I’m happy to announce Pragmatic Programmers just triggered a reprint of 3,000 more copies.

Thanks to everyone for grabbing the book, I hope you’re loving it!