Plans for supporting Web Components in AngularJS and Ember.js

Web Components [1] are an upcoming standard for custom HTML5 user interface elements. Those UI elements will eventually become interchangeable between frameworks. Now the people behind AngularJS and Ember.js have described their plans for supporting Web Components.

JavaScript quirk 7: inadvertent sharing of variables via closures

[This post is part of a series on JavaScript quirks.]

Closures are a powerful JavaScript feature: If a function leaves the place where it was created, it still has access to all variables that existed at that place. This blog post explains how closures work and why one has to be careful w.r.t. inadvertent sharing of variables.

Google’s Polymer and the future of web UI frameworks

Update 2013-05-23: Plans for supporting Web Components in AngularJS and Ember.js

At Google I/O 2013, Google presented a new web user interface (UI) framework called Polymer. The way it works is indicative of the future of all web UI frameworks.

JavaScript quirk 6: the scope of variables

[This post is part of a series on JavaScript quirks.]

In most programming languages, variables only exist within the block in which they have been declared. In JavaScript, they exist in the complete (innermost) surrounding function:

    function func(x) {
        console.log(tmp); // undefined
        if (x < 0) {
            var tmp = 100 - x;  // (*)
            ...
        }
    }

Netflix’s technology and hiring practices

In the article “Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite”, Ashlee Vance profiles Netflix and its CEO Hastings for Businessweek. The article mentions a few interesting tidbits about the company’s technology and hiring practices:

JavaScript history: undefined

Two tweets by Brendan Eich shed light on the history of JavaScript having both undefined and null [1].

Beyond “always on”

Current technology encourages us to be continuously connected. This blog post predicts that that will change.