3.1 Backlog - Deferreds

jQuery 1.6 brought Deferred support. They are a great feature that promise to make a lot of asynchronous functionality easier to write and manage. But many people struggle with uses other than 'waiting for a bunch of Ajax requests to complete'. For JavaScriptMVC 3.1, we identified an extremely common but annoying practice that becomes a one-liner with deferreds: loading data and a template and rendering the result into an element.

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, I was lucky enough to spend 4 days training Premier on JavaScriptMVC. It went really well. But, with each training I learn invaluable lessons. Here's what I took away from this trip:

FuncUnit is pretty awesome. But it might not be clear how it works in Browser vs Command (Selenium) mode. To help, I put together 2 quick illustrations that highlight what's going on.

Earlier this week, I realized that every organizing-a-jQuery-application blog, article, and conference talk misses the most important lesson on how to organize a jQuery app.

jQuery is an excellent DOM abstraction, but compared to other libraries, it leaves much to desire towards building complex, reusable functionality. There's lots of good examples and resources, but most of them fall short in providing a pattern that is:

DOM events are something that web developers often take for granted, especially with libraries like jQuery. The complexity and low-level mechanics of events are abstracted away. As far we're concerned, snippets like the following:

FuncUnit is a mashup of a bunch of awesome JavaScript projects. It can be useful knowing how they all work together to make FuncUnit tick. This article details the components and how they fit together. This is a primer for anyone wanting to contribute to FuncUnit.