I recently announced the upcoming release of Coherent 1.0 and I’ve been very pleased by the positive reception the library has received.
Lots of folks have come out of the woodwork to either say they’ve been looking for something like this for ages. I guess there are more fans of the Apple development model than I thought. And obviously a lot of us build Web applications either for a living or in our spare time.
So I’ve been thinking about JavaScript performance, because I’m hoping to make my animations run smoother. The actual animation steps (changing position, opacity, or size of a node) can’t be improved by anyone other than the browser vendor. So what can I do to optimise my code and allow me to get more raw horsepower out of the same browser?
Most JavaScript libraries support some animation of one variety or another. Nothing new there. I’d like to share the animation framework I’ve been developing for my HTML Bindings library. It builds on some of the lessons I’ve learned about developing animations for the iPhone.
So far, the most popular posts I’ve written (if you discount the rant about syncing my mobile phone on Windows) are the two about getting dynamically loaded JavaScript code to execute in the global context.
A long time ago, I started writing a port of Apple’s Cocoa Bindings to JavaScript and HTML. I finally sat down and built a little application that demonstrates some of the capabilities of the Bindings library.
In this demo, enter your flickr username (mine is jeffwatkins). The Flickr controllers are based on the AjaxController which will fetch JavaScript objects from a specified URL (in this case my Flickr proxy PHP script). Because of the magic of Bindings, the whole UI will update without you having to write a single line of code.
You’re welcome to take a look at the source of the Bindings library in subversion. In addition to making UI development with JavaScript and HTML a true pleasure, there’s a dynamic script loading facility similar to that provided by Dojo. Of course there are some other goodies packed in there — including the animation code I’ve been working on.