A longish, interesting writeup of a Steve Yegge presentation on server-side Javascript. It’s called Rhino, and is hosted in the JVM (which I don’t think is as bad as it sounds). Yegge comments on the stigmas around the JVM and Javascript itself. He asks the crowd about Javascript:

Who here thinks JavaScript is kind of icky? Come on, come on, be honest. Yeah, there we go, a couple of people. Yeah.

And then jokes about Java:

You need to write unit tests, and unfortunately in Java it’s very painful. I’m speaking into the mic now, so that everybody can hear. Unit testing in Java is painful!

What I like most about the talk is that he’s an open thinker about languages in general, and is willing to look at their respective strengths and weaknesses. It’s a mindset I can respect, where merit is based on good sense.

Here’s a good Friday afternoon read: Java is the right answer to the wrong question (and Ruby the wrong answer to the right question). My 0×02 bits: why do I find Java codebases with 75 character member names, and why is Ruby only popular slathered in framework? Or maybe those are bad measures?

A Javascript/browser game. It’s possible, and expect to see more of it in the future.

Member function name of the week:

RequestProcessorFactoryFactory.RequestSpecificProcessorFactoryFactory

Uh, way to go Apache XML-RPC team.

Not that in-browser windows are a great idea, but here is a Javascript library for showing modal and non-modal Javascript/browser windows. The library includes window styling, dialogs, and performs quite well on my workstation.

JoeHewitt talks about his iUI library, an iPhone-esque Javascript/Ajax library. The library page is here (via).

HyperScript, a joke library that shows how easy it is to generate HTML from Javascript, using a syntax similar to Perl’s CGI module.

A simple Javascript code highlighter.

A very slick rounded corners script. This stuff is looking better all the time.

TrimPath Junction is the Javascript “Rails” clone. Looks … interesting.