Release Notes: Feb 2014

What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a  round-up of recent open-source activities.

Since this is the first instalment of what will hopefully be a regular thing, I’ll look back a couple months into the past. A long (and not even complete) list of things, mostly related to web technology. I hope you’ll find something useful among it.

 

angular-encode-uri (New, github)

A trivial plugin for doing URI encoding in Angular.JS view, something it oddly doesn’t do out of the box.

 

angular-gettext (Updated, website, original announcement)

The nicest way to do translations in Angular.JS is getting even nicer, with more improved coverage of strings and filetypes, built-in support for asynchronous loading and more flexibility.

But most of all: rock-solid stability. Angular-gettext is now in use for some nice production deployments and it just works.

Highlights:

  • The website is now open-source and on github.
  • There’s an ongoing effort to split the grunt plugins up into the actual grunt bits and a more generic library. There’s also a Gulp plugin coming, so you can use any tooling you want.
  • Functionality for loading translations asynchronously.
  • Now usable without jQuery loaded.
  • Better handling of translation strings in directives.

 

angular-import-scope (New, github)

Angular.JS structures your data in nested scopes. Which is great, except when page structure doesn’t work like that and you need the inner data on a much higher level (say in the navigation). With import-scope, you can import the scope of a lower-level ui-view somewhere higher up.

mockup

 

angular-select2 (New, github)

A select2 plugin for Angular.JS that actually works, with ng-options support.

 

connect-body-rewrite (New, github, DailyJS coverage)

A middleware plugin for Connect.JS that helps  you transform request bodies on the fly, typically on the result of a proxied call. Used in connect-livereload-safe and connect-strip-manifest (see below).

 

connect-livereload-safe (New, github)

A Connect.JS middleware plugin to inject livereload. What’s wrong with connect-livereload? Well, I ran into some freak issues where modifying the DOM during load breaks Angular.JS. This plugin avoids that.

 

connect-strip-manifest (New, github)

Connect.JS middleware to strip the HTML5 app cache manifest. Makes it possible to disable the caching in development, without having weird tricks in your HTML file.

 

grunt-git (Updated, github)

A pile of new git commands supported, with a much improved test suite.

 

grunt-unknown-css (New, github)

Lets you analyze HTML files to figure out which classes don’t exist anymore in the CSS. Good for hunting down obsolete style declarations.

 

grunt-usemin-uglifynew (New, github)

A plugin for grunt-usemin that reuses existing .min.js files. This speeds up compilation of web apps and lets you use the minified builds provided by library authors.

 

json-inspect (New, github)

Get JSON context information out of a string. Lets you build text editors that are aware of the structure of the JSON underneath it.

Suppose you have this:


{
  "string": "value",
  "number": 3,
  "object": {
    "key": "val"
  },
  "array": [
    1,
    2
  ]
}

With json-inspect you can figure out what it means if the cursor is at a given position:


var context = jsonInspect(myJson, 2, 6); 
// { key: 'string', start: 4, end: 21, value: 'value' }

var context = jsonInspect(myJson, 9, 5); 
// { key: 'array.1', start: 93, end: 102, value: 2 }

 

mapbox-dist (New, github)

A compiled version of Mapbox.JS, which you can use with Bower.

 

Nested Means (New, github)

A data quantization scale that handles non-uniform distributions gracefully.

Or in human language: a Javascript module that calculates how you can make a meaningful legend for colorizing a map based on long tail data. If you’d use a linear scale, you’d end up with two colors: maximum and minimum. Nested means tries to adjust the legend to show more meaningful data.

nested-means-3
A linear scale would map everything to white and dark-green. Nested means calculates a scale that maps to many colors.

 

node-trackchange (New, github)

An experiment in using Harmony Proxies for tracking changes to objects. Here’s an example:


var orig = {
  test: 123
};

// Create a wrapper that tracks changes.
var obj = ChangeTracker.create(orig);

// No changes initially:
console.log(obj.__dirty); // -> []

// Do things
orig.test = 1;
orig.other = true;

// Magical change tracking!
console.log(obj.__dirty); // -> ['test', 'other']

You can even wrap constructors. This ensures that each created instance automatically has change tracking built-in:


TestType = ChangeTracker.createWrapper(OrigType);

var obj = new TestType();
console.log(obj.__dirty);

 

pofile (New, github)

A gettext .po parser and serializer, usable in the browser and on the backend. The angular-gettext module is powered by this library.

 

Blog it or it didn’t happen.

March 1, 2014 10:05 #angular #nodejs #javascript

Related

Comments