JavaScript Tutorials

When developing a Javascript-heavy, AJAX-riddled site, I often run into a 2.0 type of problem: supporting the browser back button. While it’s wonderful to build a site where users are brought to various content pages without the window refreshing, this excellent user experience will be completely ruined if you hit the back button and it returns you to the root of the site (or worse the last site you visited).

Thus, integrating the browser becomes an integral part of any Javascript developer’s toolkit.

Making the browser recognize Javascript changes

The first problem we have to solve is making the browser respect a Javascript change as a page change. However we have to be sure not to change the actual location of the page, or our AJAX or Javascript experience will be shot.

One thing to look at is the window location’s … (more…)

Although there are many ways to make a clock using Javascript, most use Javascript’s date() object and the setInterval() method. In this tutorial we’ll start by building a clock using these simple functions. Then we’ll explore some interesting ways of optimizing our clock, and hopefully learn a whole bunch of Javascript along the way.

Getting the current time

Let’s kick things off by getting the current time with Javascript. To do so, we will need the Javascript date() object. Remember that this gets the client-side time, e.g. the time in the user’s browser, not the actual time on the server. Client-side time is great for situations like ours, since it takes away any time-zone localization problems.

The date() object is simple enough to use, just instantiate it:

var d = new Date();

Then you can call any properties of this object, getMinutes(), getDay(), getDate(), etc. … (more…)

Do you remember the dark days of HTML? A million inline properties that were a nightmare to handle even on the smallest websites. Thankfully CSS came along, and good developers now control most of their styling through a centralized stylesheet.

So why shouldn’t we do the same thing with Javascript? A bunch of inline events all over the document with onclick=”” or onmouseover=”” is just as bad as inline styles or font-tags.

However, attaching these event listeners from a central Javascript poses a challenge, since the listener implementation differs from browser to browser. While there are a lot of scripts to attach event listeners, in 2001 Scott Andrew came up with an excellent cross-browser event handler script.

For our Javascript code-library, we’ll use a modification of it:

function addEvent(obj, evType, fn){
if (obj.addEventListener){
… (more…)

Although Javascript has an excellent method for attaching trailing zeros to decimals, there is no native function to attach leading zeros. For example, if you are dealing in currency, and want ten cents to appear as .10, instead of .1, you would just write:

var theNumber = .1;
theNumber = theNumber.toFixed(2);

Javascript’s toFixed() is great for trailing zeros, but what if you wanted a fixed number of leading zeros? If you wanted 10 to display as 0010?

A leading zeros function is handy tool in any Javascript library, so let’s write one now. We’ll need two variables: a number to format and the number of digits. We’ll change the number into a string, then attach leading zeros (more…)

It’s a common problem in JavaScript: to use private functions you define them as an object. Later, when interfacing this object with some JavaScript library, you discover that several of the namespaces overlap.

While there is certainly some debate as to how to write an unobtrusive set of JavaScript functions, the most elegant solution is as always very simple. Basically, you wrap the set of functions in a nameless function, and then call this function immediately. The syntax we are going to use works like this:

(function(argument) {
alert(argument);
}) (‘What you want to alert’);

If you’re unfamiliar with the notation, we are declaring a nameless function, then calling this function immediately with the final set of parentheses.

This is an excellent way to isolate any functions since everything is protected within the scope of the function. Now let’s strip it down a bit, … (more…)