tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Because I'd rather write my programs in a Lisp like Javascript?

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Actually, a bunch of us are working on taking the pain out of async programming. Here's my approach, using (fab)'s chained continuations:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tr4nslator/4532445014/in/set-72...

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"Traditional Chinese characters are widely used, and are the de facto writing standard in Hong Kong."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Hong_Kong#Written_...

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

You can even do that in half the bytes by making use of all unary operators together:

  -~+[]

-~ is a good proxy for ++ when incrementing unassigned variables.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I think this should probably point here:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#scripts

The salient point is that CoffeeScript now automatically compiles any code in a script tag with type text/coffeescript. Pretty cool.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

The Japanese government is not unique here. Earmarks and pork are just as big a problem in the United States.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Do you anticipate that the use of WebSockets will improve performance? If so, can you estimate to what degree?

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I actually think this is less magical than most approaches, since there's no pre-compilation or "with" scoping magic. Sinatra's hello world is awesome, until you realize that a lot of the cool stuff is scoping magic that you have to throw out when your app has to play nicely with others.

My original approach for (fab) was like jQuery:

  fab()
    .find( path )
      .bind( method, handler )
      .find( subpath )
        .bind( method, handler )
      .end()
    .end()
  .end()

but I realized that I could simplify things by getting rid of methods entirely, and reserving methods for HTTP methods and status codes.

As for people not realizing they can define functions outside of the DSL, I'm hoping that the extensibility of middleware will mitigate that, just as the ecosystem of plugins did for jQuery.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Indeed you can. (fab) is 100% async:

http://gist.github.com/287475#file_hello_async.js

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Indeed, CoffeeScript was built on Ruby, and its REPL on Narwhal.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It's vaguely lispy, but without all that nesting.

Multi-line functions work okay, but it's definitely cleaner to name them and put them somewhere else so that your code ends up looking like a site map:

http://gist.github.com/287475#file_hello_middleware.js

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Yeah, a (fab) function just returns itself. It's like jQuery's chaining, but using argument signatures instead of object methods to delegate work. The last (fab) is just a way to indicate the chain is over so that a listener can be returned, and has the additional benefit of making it look declarative.

tr4nslator

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Hey all,

I just launched a dead-simple web framework on top of node.js. It uses (abuses?) a lot of the dynamic nature of javascript to create a jQuery-inspired DSL that's pure javascript, allowing you to create really concise web apps like this:

  ( fab )
    ( "/time", function(){ return "the time is " + (new Date).toTimeString() } )
    ( "/date", function(){ return "the date is " + (new Date).toDateString() } )
  ( fab )

I'd love to hear any feedback from the folks here, so check it out and let me know what you think.

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

.live() : DOM event handling :: CSS : DOM styling

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

The latter was just from my framework of choice until now, Tornado.

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

Server-side Javascript frameworks seem to be in the midst of a Cambrian explosion right now.

I just pushed my own today:

http://github.com/jed/fab/

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

Actually, I'm pretty sure this is another version of the Picasa scrollbar, which has been around for a few years:

http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20090102/PIcasaMac-main_610x449.p...

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

Or for a more quantitative approach, with 1.7 Chinese characters per English word[1] and an average English word length at 5.1 letters[2], then somewhere around 420 characters.

(But of course, it really depends on the nature of the text.)

[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002379.h... [2] http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

Actually, I think their solution is pretty elegant; any task that takes that long is abstracted to its own HTTP request, which itself can be blocking without blocking the original request.

tr4nslator

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

I'm pretty sure they're not using much metadata, but instead using collaborative filtering based on the libraries other iTunes users.

"Apple's proprietary recommendation engine that uses collaborative filtering and iTunes' built-in rating system to generate music recommendations"

from http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/03/24/apple_switches...

tr4nslator

Submissions

UTF-n: Brainstorming alternate text encodings

(fab) - A pure javascript DSL for building async web apps

On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ask HN: Review our app, textpanda (web-based input shortcuts for the lazy)

Ask HN: Review our app, typd.in (a web-based Japanese IME)

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