Tag: JavaScript (Page 1 of 12)

Articles, tips, and resources for JavaScript-based development.

What Are Source Maps (And Are They Needed)?

January 22, 2019 / Tom

If you work on the front-end of a site in any capacity – be it for a plugin, a theme, or even something outside of WordPress – you’re likely working with minification tools.

The benefits are obvious, right?

it lessens the payload,
it allows us to focus on development on our local environments

But one of the features that come with working with these technologies and that’s the ability to generate source maps.

And this raises a question (or maybe two): What are source maps? And are they even needed?

You can claim it’s late to the game to talk about this, but there are always people entering the industry that may not know this material.

So why not cover it?

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery (As Weird As That May Sound)

August 23, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that I enjoy about working with WordPress is the ability to bring in third-party libraries and tools with which to work.

This doesn’t mean they don’t come without their learning curve (they all do, right?), but it’s often fun – albeit frustrating, at times – to incorporate and then manipulate what you’re doing.

As far as third-party technologies go, I’ve seen people bring things in such as the Laravel Illuminate package with WordPress.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: Illuminate

And I know, especially in recent years, many have brought in components such as React and Vue.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: React

In one such instance, I’ve been doing some work with Angular. And if you’re used to ES6, vanilla JavaScript, or using jQuery, then triggering Angular events with jQuery can seem a bit weird at first.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: Angular

But once you understand the markup and how Angular handles its events, it’s not so bad.

Is It Really Worth Debating jQuery Versus ES6?

June 5, 2018 / Tom

When building WordPress plugins for myself or others, several of the things I take into account – as we all should – is the level of maintainability, scalability, and support for the plugin as WordPress continues to move forward.

Specifically, I’m talking about client-side development (or, more simply, JavaScript).

As the support for ES6 continues to rise, jQuery continues to move forward with development, and the desire to use new APIs to build out our solutions, I believe it’s worth asking the question:

Do we really need to stick with jQuery?

An Object-Oriented Way of Working with Models and Web Applications

May 23, 2018 / Tom

When we talk about the concept of Models in object-oriented programming, we’re usually referring to a class that is a representation of the data stored in the database.

That is is, when information is stored in rows and columns, we populate a class, its attributes, and so on with that information so that we’re able to pass it around the application, manipulate it as needed, and then possibly serialize the data back to the database.

But in a web application, it’s fair to assume that the model might need to be possible to the front-end to be used. That is, imagine a front-end request making a call to the server, requesting a model (or a collection of models), and then rendering them on the front-end.

Though this particular post isn’t code-oriented, I still think it’s worth thinking through the process of translating a model from the server and then rendering it on the front-end of the web application.

Learn The New Thing! (Wait, Not So Fast)

April 24, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that I dig about the software development industry (others, too, but this is where we are, right?) is that it requires some degree of constant learning.

For some, that can induce a level of fatigue. And I get it because I’ve felt it. I don’t know if it’s an age thing (I’m not old, yet, but there’s a lot to be said from going from just yourself into an apartment into a house and a family, but I digress). I think that comes with a bit of thrashing is continually trying to keep up with every new thing that comes out.

The thing is that the further I get into my career, the less I’m interested in the learning The New Thing the moment it’s released.

Remember when this was The New Thing?

And I say this knowing full well it’d be easy to dismiss what I have to say since I’ve written on going deep rather than wide with technology.

But this is a bit different.