Do you have a piece of JavaScript you want refactored? Does it use Prototype? Submit it to the Prototype core team. They will pick a few submissions and dedicate a post to each one, refactoring out loud along the way.

Stoyan Stefanov is a member of Yahoo’s Performance team; he’s worked on a variety of performance-related projects at Yahoo, including the popular YSlow plugin for Firebug. Stoyan’s latest project is Object Oriented JavaScript, a new book from Packt. Chapter 8, “Coding and Design Patterns.” is available as a free download.

Extending jQuery with subclassing and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). Subclassing creates new classes, while AOP modfies the methods of a single object.

Andrew Dupont's presentation from The Ajax Experience in Boston, Defensive, Cross-Browser Coding with Prototype. Slides are provided, audio to follow.

There’s a common misconception that Google’s “next-gen” web platform called Gears only (or even primarily) enables offline capabilities for web applications. The truth of the matter is that Google’s ambitions are far greater, and the browser extension’s capabilities are more multifarious, than this reputation suggests. If you have extra time this weekend, the following presentation by Google’s Chris Prince, given at this past May’s Google I/O developer conference, is an informative visual and oral walk through of Gears.

No word yet on the Sitepen blog (they are all probably busy at the Ajax Experience in Boston) but the download page has been updated showing 1.2.0 as the current production version.

Python 2.6 will be the last release before 3.0. This article explains the new features in Python 2.6, released on October 1 2008.

Ingrid is an unobtrusive jQuery component for creating very nice looking & effective datagrids. It simply adds datagrid behaviors (column resizing, paging, sorting, row and column styling, and more) to your tables.

This week I had the opportunity to write a method that wraps the native JavaScript ‘window.scroll’ method with one that animates the scroll. The native ‘window.scroll’ method is well supported by all Tier-A browsers and is a great way to ensure that dynamic content is visible on the screen. However, it is often jarring to the user when the page jumps to the desired position, so instead we will animate the scrolling.

A paste bin is a very handy tool when you’re working as part of a team, especially if there’s any remote work involved. At Clearleft, we often use pastebin.com though I’ve also used dpaste in the past. I like the way that pastebin allows you to create subdomains on the fly: just type in the URL to create it. Enter JS Bin, this is a paste bin with a twist.

Toru Yamaguchi has built a very cool shim, ExDOMStorage, which implements the HTML 5 DOM Storage API for IE 6 and 7. It does so by strapping in the functionality via an HTC behaviour.

We released alphas in 2007, betas in 2008, and are planning a few release candidates, with a final release in October 2008. While not ready for production, we highly encourage you to grab the release candidates and test them against your code. At this point, only highly critical bugs will be fixed before the final release.

Protonotes are notes that you add to your prototype that allow project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on the prototype. You can think of it like a discussion board/wiki in direct context of your prototype. To enable Protonotes on your prototypes, all you have to do is copy and paste a few lines of JavaScript into your prototype. That's it. Once you do that, anyone who visits your prototype can add/edit/delete notes. They don't have to install anything or sign up for anything.

For some time I've been subscribed to the Symfony Project's RSS feed and have enjoyed their weekly summaries and watching another web framework grow. One of the ideas that I found while scanning a particular blog post was their "Web Debug Toolbar". I was inspired and the very same day I started the Django Debug Toolbar.

At some point in the internet evolution, IE6 was the Golden Grail of browsers. Big CSS support, new features, it had everything. That was 10 years ago. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t have to update it, IE6 competitors were practically nonexistent or not worth bothering. Now IE6 is a pain. I will try to give you tips that will relieve your pain.

Dojo widget tutorial for displaying a tag cloud. Even though you could use it for any kind of links, the most common use is obviously tags from your blog or other website. The TagCloud widget is using dojo.data and any kind of store to display the tags. Let’s jump into some code shall we. In the bottom of this tutorial you will find links for downloading all the code.

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

From Web 2.0 Expo in New York 9/17/2008. Fourteen basic ideas 37Signals have learned by working together over the last couple of years followed by a Q&A. 1) Momentum is incredibly important. 2) Planning is Vastly Overrated. 3) Get rid of abstractions. 4) Decisions are temporary. 5) Red Flag Words. 6) Interruption is the enemy of productivity. 7) Focus on what doesn’t change. 8) Worrying about things that don’t matter yet. 9) Underdoing 10) Find the right size 11) Follow the Chefs 12) Always be Questioning 13) Give up on hard problems 14) Work less.

Matthew Russell, author of ORA’s “Dojo: The Definitive Guide” now has a companion blog where he’s posting new widgets complete with screencasts to explain them clearly. His awesome first outing includes a neat reflection widget that builds on AOL’s high-performance CDN hosting of Dojo and practices what Dojo preaches about pragmatic progressive enhancement.

Christophe Porteneuve, Prototype core member, slides and demo source code examples from @mediaAjax London 2008 presentation. The slides feature the key points, concepts, workflow, and code highlights. The side demos provide the concrete examples and working implementations. I won’t explain what Ajax/XHR is and I’ll assume you know what progressive enhancement means.

Jon Bentley, a distinguished computer scientist known for many publications, published Writing Efficient Programs. In this out-of-print classic, Bentley provides a unified, pragmatic treatment of program efficiency, independent of language and host platform. For ease of presentation, Bentley codified his methods as a set of terse rules. The following is the list of Bentley's rules, edited from Appendix C of Writing Efficient Programs.

We're really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11). You can download it today from http://gears.google.com.

The distinction between setuptools, PyPI, distutils, eggs, easy_install, pkg_resources and zc.buildout used to make my head spin. Kevin Teague’s outstanding explanation made it all make sense.

This tutorial will teach you how to make a stunning comment form using an old postcard photo using basic Photoshop and CSS skills. The code is tested in IE7, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. Live demo included.

I frequently have to fetch JSON data from the server. When the request returns, I would populate a scoped instance of the JSON object, before performing a series of carefully choreographed page/JavaScript updates. While this works, it becomes more and more difficult as you modularize your JavaScript. I now use the command pattern, where we pass in a function as the action and use the Lazy-Loading Callback Pattern to wait for the AJAX request to complete; or instantly return if the data is not stale.