The latest Android tablet Nexus 7 powered by Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) gets many favorable reviews (see the analysis from e.g. Ars Technica, AnandTech, or The Verge). Google Chrome, the default web browser for Jelly Bean, works quite well on this 7″ tablet. How does it compare with other tablets? I’v...

There are suggestions out there on how to improve the quality of an online resume (such as LinkedIn) or the dead-tree classic version thereof. Amazingly, I’ve seen tons of cases where people simple ignore those valuable tips. Based on years staring at hundreds of CVs, the following three points are ...

PhantomJS is cloud-friendly as it runs well on Amazon EC2, Heroku, and other server platforms. But what if you want to use PhantomJS without the hassle of setting up and maintaining a server? The solution is to use IronWorker, an elastic task queue service.

After you have seen the distribution of JavaScript keywords and statements, it is time for another fun statistics. Now we will take a look at the histogram of various JavaScript tokens.

Every now and then I got someone asking me why I did bother to create Esprima at all. There exists already several great JavaScript parsers written in JavaScript. Most likely, it is easier to use the existing parser than writing a new one. This post summarizes my reasoning behind the birth of Esprim...

Dolphin is a popular alternative web browser for Android. Until recently, it is essentially a custom browser interface on top of the system Android WebKit library. This is now changed with the new Dolphin Engine which promised boosted performance and improved HTML5 support. How does it stack up?

Many modern laptops come with an SSD (solid-state drive) instead of a traditional magnetic disk. Because it is silent, it is not possible to hear the spinning sound anymore as the disk enters a period of high activities. This can be bad, often a continuous I/O access indicates a problem in the runni...

Version 0.5 of Eclipse Orion, the web-focused IDE, has been released. One of its improved features is a better editing autocomplete, known in the Eclipse world as Content Assist or within Microsoft Visual Studio users as IntelliSense. The logic to drive the autocompletion is made possible because th...

Modern JavaScript engines can defer the parsing process of a function body until it is completely needed. Why is this done and how does this work?

The subject of UIWebView not using JIT-enabled JavaScript engine becomes popular again, mainly due to the fresh release of Google Chrome for iOS. Unlike Chrome on other platform, Chrome on iOS is just an alternative user-interface on top of the UIWebView component hence making Chrome slightly inferi...

(By Fir0002/Flagstaffotos (Own work) CC-BY-NC, via Wikimedia Commons)

When developing a large-scale application, modularity becomes an important factor. If the environment is JavaScript, several module patterns, from AMD to CommonJS, are available for your disposal. Every one of them usually works around the fact that there is no linking stage in JavaScript, all compi...

A bad API can lead to ambiguities and reduced readability. One very common thing I still encounter in various JavaScript frameworks is the so-called Boolean trap, i.e. the unwise use of Boolean argument(s) in a function call. Reviewing or reading code which gets trapped there is not fun. The earlier...

Last week Fluent Conference in San Francisco was a blast. I got to meet old friends, made new ones, and finally got to speak to some people I know only from the online media. For a nice wrap-up (along with the list of interesting videos), check out Axel’s blog post.

It’s summer! Time for me to hit the road and give some tech talks.

There was a lot of discussion about the recent rejection of Github pull request workflow by Linus Torvalds, the father of Git (and Linux). Note that Linus does like Github, “great at hosting”. Unfortunately the submission via the pull request mechanic does not meet the standard of kernel contributio...

After the fun distribution charts of statements and keywords in popular JavaScript libraries, it is time for another metrics analysis. For a while, I was wondering how JavaScript developers come up with a variable name, function name, and other identifiers. Is it just few characters? Is it not that ...

According to Albus Dumbledore:

After you’ve seen the chart of JavaScript keywords distribution, it’s time to go a bit deeper to the syntax level. This time let’s find out the most popular JavaScript statements. The specification lists 15 different types of statements, with the iteration statements having four possible variants. L...

For the next few weeks, don’t expect much updates on this blog. Within few hours I am scheduled to take a flight SFO-HGK-SIN-CGK. Unless something is going terribly wrong, I’ll be in Indonesia to handle some important matters. I will not maintain a strict radio silence, but since I plan to leverage ...

While PhantomJS is far from perfect, there are still some misconceptions out there. This blog post attempts to clarify some of them.

When I looked at some of the functions in the core parser of Esprima, I usually had one or two ideas on how to improve the readability. A week ago my concern was a pair of function important for parsing objects in the literal format. It’s a heavily branched code using a switch statement, as illustra...

As you can see, this blog finally gets a new look based on the excellent WordPress Bootstrap theme from 320press (modelled after Twitter Bootstrap). Behind the scene, there is also another major change as I moved from self-hosted WordPress with Dreamhost to the managed WordPress service from Page.ly...

One little feature I added to Esprima parser demo was syntax tree visualization (using YUI TreeView). While it is already possible to see the JSON version of the parsed AST, often a much more visual representation improves the syntax analysis workflow. It is also more educational. An example code th...

Joining the buzzword-laden crowd, here I’d like to say that PhantomJS goes to the cloud.

It’s lunch time. You enter your favorite cafe and place an order for your beloved sandwich. Nobody else is there so your tasty meal is ready in some minutes. The next day, the same situation. This time, there are few other customers in front of you. You wonder if your waiting time (for the sandwich ...

Starting from Ghost Flower, the recent PhantomJS 1.5 release, the standard build for Linux is pure headless without X11. Even Xvfb is not needed. That means you can compile and use PhantomJS in a system without any GUI at all. This would be really useful in some setup such as continuous integration ...

The above text cloud is created using Fotowall.

A common approach to implement code coverage analysis for JavaScript code is by adding extra instrumentation to the code. Since the instrument function is also executed by the JavaScript engine, this gives additional information as to which part of the code is being executed. A naive trick is to wra...