[The Treehouse Show]
I'm Nick Petitt. >>I'm Jason Seifer.
And you're watching The Treehouse Show.
Your weekly dose of Internets where we talk about
all things web design, web development, and more.
In this episode, we'll be talking about JavaScript languages and plugins,
PHP best practices, and more.
Let's check it out.
[The Treehouse Show]
The first thing that we're going to be talking about this week is a project from Mozilla
called LLJS or low level JavaScript.
This is a really, really interesting project that is a dialect of JavaScript
that offers a C-like type system with manual memory management.
I understood some of those words.
Well, what's interesting about it, is that it compiles down to JavaScript
and if you like having types in your JavaScript and C-like structures, this will let you do that.
It's right now a bit of an experiment and the syntax is pretty interesting.
There is all sorts of stuff that you can run on the site.
We can't get into everything here but interesting project,
check it out, too much to summarize.
It looks fun. This is if your really, really want to nerd out with your languages, give this a try.
Very cool stuff. >>Somewhere to CoffeeScript. >>Somewhere, all right.
So over on Smashing Magazine, they wrote this really interesting post about this icon
that I have been seeing all over the place but I guess I've never seen anyone
actually talk about it or formalize it and say, "Hey! This is a thing."
Basically, they are calling it the responsive navicon and--
Is that the little icon that shows what's going on like a mobile application?
Kind of like that, yeah, it's this little icon here that is those three little lines
and you see this in like Facebook App on the iPhone.
You see this really just all over the place, and in some instances
you'll hit this and like the App would slide over and you can see navigation.
Sometimes it will pop out a menu, but basically, it's this design pattern that's been developing
across many different websites and apps that when you hit this icon,
it will show you some sort of navigation.
So I thought it was pretty cool that they went ahead and talked about it for once.
I haven't heard anybody else really actually formalized that,
I just think it's been everybody kind of just copying one another.
Yeah, that's interesting because everybody does seem to use that.
Yeah, very interesting. >>Cool. So we'll check that out.
Next up is a project called JavaScript stacktrace.
This is a piece of JavaScript that you can include in your webpages that will give you a stacktrace
when something goes wrong or when there is an error in your JavaScript.
This can be really difficult in certain situations where you have an error in
one method in JavaScript but you are not exactly sure where it came from.
So what this piece of JavaScript does is it shows you the entire method call in
stack chain of what happened in JavaScript, letting you debug things very, very easy.
So with that stacktrace, it will show from that first line where something happened
and go all the way back up and show you where it ultimately ended up.
Exactly. >>Got it. >>You can get this at stocktracejs.com.
There is documentation and download links right there as well as in our shown apps.
Pretty nifty.
So next up is PHP the right way which is good because I do not want do PHP the wrong way.
Right. >>PHP the right way is basically just really good documentation for PHP
because I think there's a lot of bad documentation out there and a lot of really old blog post
just because PHP has been around for so long and I think it is one of the easier
back-end languages to get into and there is kind of less of a barrier to entry.
So a lot of people are using it and there is a lot documentation out there.
So PHP the right way tries to fix all that and just create really nice documentation for PHP.
So we can go ahead and scroll through here and kind of see language highlights
and everything that you would want to know.
Yeah, it's really good that it establishes some of the best practices
that you wouldn't pick up when just reading the normal documentation.
Exactly. >>And next up I think everybody is excited is that's our App of the week.
Let's check it out.
{App Review.]
Our App for the week this week is a project called Anvil.
This is a free application for managing Ruby web applications on OS X.
It's really nice, it's a menu bar application and it uses the PAW server
on the back end to spin up sites for you.
So what you do is you drop something like you quit the plus button, import your site
into Anvil and it will automatically set up a local .dev version of the site.
So you have my project.dev. Click that to turn it on and you can go to that right in your browser.
Really quick, doesn't require too much messing around with anything
and like said it is a free download.
You can get that at anvil or mac.com.
That's pretty amazing that we live in an age
where you can manage web applications from the menu bar.
You just kind off surf that and I better check up on that thing.
I better do some work. >>Yeah.
So next up is verimail.js.
I saw some awesome cat pictures though on Reddit the other day. >>Oh yeah.
Yeah. >>I haven't seen any of those.>>I'll show you later. >>Sweet. Right.
Verimail.js is basically a piece of JavaScript or a jQuery plugin
that allows you to validate email addresses.
Now I know that sounds really lame but if you ever tried to
to validate an email address before--
Yeah. Don't you just make sure that's there is an @ character in it.
Not quite because Jason that could be a twitter handle.
Oh that's true. >>Boom. >>Email me at jseifer.
It's actually really complicated to verify an email address.
We'll not verify but validate an email address when somebody is typing it into a form.
So verimail.js just makes it really easy to do that.
I think it is also cohandles typos. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if you type in .cno instead of .com for example, it will actually say
"Hey, did you mean to type .com instead and we'll offer you alternatives for your typo."
So pretty nice. It's very feature-rich, has a lot more to offer
than what have seen from typical JavaScript plugins that do the same thing.
Yeah, that's really neat. >>So pretty nifty.
Next up is a website called js2coffee.org.
I really love this if you're using CoffeeScript which is a dialect of JavaScript.
It's what all the cool kids are using.
All of them and some of the not cool kids but we love them anyway.
Yes. So this is a really nice site. It has two panels.
You can put your JavaScript on one side
and it will show you the equivalent CoffeeScript on the other side.
And it works also with CoffeeScript to JavaScript.
This can be very pretty useful if maybe you know you're just learning CoffeeScript
and you want a bit of a refresher on what's actually happening in the code.
So check that out that's js2coffee.org super useful. Not much to say.
I love CoffeeScript. >>Very cool stuff.
We'll next up, we have a blog post from Design Shack where they compare
Zurb foundation to Twitter Bootstrap and I read this whole post.
These are two frameworks we've gone over before on The Treehouse Show. >>Yes. That's true.
So watch all of our back episodes before you read this post.
And then you can read this post after you've gone through the pre-requisites. >>Yeah.
Right and you can basically get down to the bottom where they have
the conclusion and they say, "Cut the crap, who wins?
And they say it's difficult to declare a winner.
Now, I don' think there is any kind of surprise there.
It's kind of like going for two or three seasons of "why they won't be romance on television"
and ultimately nothing happens.
Basically the answer is. >>I saw that show. >>It's all the shows.
Too many times. >>Perhaps it's The Treehouse Show?
I've heard--I'm not trying to get involved in this framework fight
but I've heard that foundation has a great grid.
Yeah. >>That's what the design people say. >>Exactly.
Yeah I mean, there's small differences and larger differences
but basically the answer is to try out both of them and see which one you like better
because sometimes one is going to work for one project
and one is going to work better for another project.
The answer is it depends. >>Try it on. >>That's right. Try before you buy.
And that's it--we're going to end the show with a blog post on setting up
the perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Now perfect is obviously a relative term. This is just one man's opinion with a blog.
However, he does offer some really good advice
and interesting defaults when setting up a new development environment
that goes through installing Xcode in iOS as well as--
even sending your sidebar icon size to small in system preferences.
Wow. >>I know. >>That's detail.
But other than that, he does have a link to a really useful set of dot files
for setting up your terminal and commands and as well as using
Alfred.App, which is one of my favorites.
So great blog post. Go ahead and give it a read.
Again, try it on. See if these preferences fit you and then report back.
And you can decide for yourself what's perfect. >>Exactly.
So Jason, what have we learned today.
We learned that 3-line icons can be very important.
All right. Well that's it for this week's episode of The Treehouse Show.
If you like to follow us on twitter I'm @nickrp. >>And I'm @jseifer.
We want to thank you so much for watching this edition of The Treehouse Show.
For share notes and more, check out our YouTube channel at youtube.com/gotreehouse.
And of course, if you would like to see more videos like this one
you can check us out at teamtreehouse.com.
Thanks so much for watching. See you next week.
[The Treehouse Show.]