JavaScript Journal

I've read an interesting article by Felipe Gaucho called "Good Java Developers Deserve Better Salaries," where he states that employers have to increase salaries for Java developers. Unfortunately, in the market economies such demands won't work. In enterprise IT no one just raises salary if there is a way to hire someone else for less money. It's just not in the corporate culture where people are treated as nameless resources. Have you ever wondered why policemen get lower salaries than Java developers even though people in the uniform risk their lives on daily basis?  It's because there are many people who apply for jobs in the police. Preparing a mediocre policemen takes about the same time as preparing a mediocre Java programmer. The same holds true for good policemen... (more)

Using Ext JS, Servlets, JSON, MySQL and Tomcat on Fedora

Java Developer Magazine on Ulitzer These days the popularity of Ext JS (a JavaScript library) is gaining momentum. One of the most popular widgets within Ext JS is the DataGrid. The reason - displaying data from a database is one of the most common tasks of a web application. "Out of the box" the DataGrid has functionality (for instance, ascending or descending sorting and reordering of c... (more)

JavaScript: The Good Parts

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentio... (more)

Performance Analysis of Dynamic JavaScript Menus

RIA Developer's Journal on Ulitzer In my previous article I talked about the impact of jQuery Selectors on a page that I analyzed. The page took 4.8 seconds in the onLoad event handler. 2 seconds were mainly caused by the selectors as described in the blog. The other 2.8 seconds were caused by a dynamic JavaScript menu - in that particular case it was the superfish jQuery plugin. A closer... (more)

Is Test Overlap A Necessary Evil?

In a recent blog post titled "The Limitations of TDD", Jolt Awards colleague Andrew Binstock shared some reservations Cédric Beust has about TDD. When a person of extensive experience like Cédric speaks about testing, you pay attention. And I did. Among the very interesting quotes from Cédric that Andrew has reproduced, the following really struck me: Another important point is that unit t... (more)