JavaScript development, design, and consulting.
Justin Meyer : CEO
Justin has over 7 years of application development and management experience and has been in over 20 different application development cycles. Working for both GE and Accenture, Justin is well versed in the methodology required to organize a project to a successful conclusion.
Talks / Presentations
Justin Meyer News
Significant Whitespace
If you haven't read it already, please read Ryan Florence's A Case Against Using CoffeeScript. It's well thought out and makes a lot of interesting points. But for me, the most important one was: Significant White-space Means CoffeeScript Will Always Be Compiled.
Continue reading3.2 $.Controller - Templated Event Binding
JavaScriptMVC 3.2 brings a lot of great features and enhancements. So many features that changes to $.Controller didn't make the cut for our upcoming 3.2 article. This article reviews 3.2's $.Controller and talks about templated event binding (something we neglected to write up for 3.1).
Continue readingjQuery Resize Event
When building web applications, it can be tricky to get pages to layout correctly, especially when layout can't be done with CSS. Widgets that can dynamically change the layout only complicate matters. JavaScriptMVC 3.1 packs a new resize event that greatly simplifies these layouts.
Continue readingHaving your Cake and Eating it without Getting Fat
On stack overflow, someone asked what are the pros and cons of using JavaScriptMVC. Believe it or not, there no cons for using JavaScriptMVC.
Continue readingKnock JavaScriptMVC's Back Out
I've read a lot of articles and tweets comparing JavaScriptMVC, BackboneJS, and KnockoutJS. A lot of good things can be said about these frameworks. Backbone is largely similar to JavaScriptMVC's MVC components, and Knockout has a really amazing observable system.
Continue readingAdvanced jQuery Training at SF jQuery Conf 2011
The team at Jupiter will be giving the Advanced jQuery Training at the San Fransisco jQuery Conference on April 15th, 2011. If you write complex jQuery apps, and consider yourself a jQuery Pro, this will be the most beneficial 8 hours of development advice you ever get. If you are coming, please leave a note about topic you'd like covered in the comments below. The remainder of this article covers our goals for the training, our approach, and what we plan on covering.
Continue readingJavaScriptMVC and List Performance
Most applications center around displaying and interacting with lists and individual pieces of data. Consider applications like GMail, Grooveshark, Twitter, Facebook, and Hulu. Each of these applications displays a list of items where a user can drill down into a single item. In many cases, the user can edit a single item while in the list view.
Continue readingCreating a JavaScriptMVC Slider
JavaScriptMVC makes it easy to write and organize copious amounts of JavaScript code. And although this usually means working among its Model-View-Controller layers to create something amazing, often, you'll find yourself wanting to make a lightweight, reusable UI widget. This demo walks you through creating a basic slider widget.
Continue readingJavaScriptMVC 3.0: Good To Go!
For the past year and a half, we've been pouring our heart into JavaScriptMVC 3.0. So it's with great excitement that we're ready to announce 3.0 is here to solve your JavaScript headaches. With over 1800 commits, the new version is faster, easier to use, and more powerful.
Continue readingPremier Training Lessons Learned
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:
Continue readingFuncUnit Infographic
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.
Continue readingjQuery.View - Client Side Templates for jQuery
Everyone loves client side templates. They are a great way to create html which is something JavaScript apps do all the time.
Continue readingOrganizing A jQuery Application
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.
Continue readingjQuery.Model - A jQuery Model Layer
Complex JavaScript applications are mostly about making it easy to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) data. But being so close to the UI, most JavaScript developers ignore the data layer and focus on making animated drag-drop effects.
Continue readingWriting the Perfect jQuery Plugin
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:
Continue readingOrganize jQuery Widgets with jQuery.Controller
Do you like organized code and hate nested functions that are impossible to reuse? Want to be able to extend plugins and widgets? Do you want these widgets to clean themselves up after they are removed? Great! JavaScriptMVC-extracted jQuery.Controller is the easiest and most robust way to build jQuery widgets.
Continue readingA Simple, Powerful, Lightweight Class for jQuery
jQuery's functional programming style is downright elegant for manipulating the DOM. But it lacks the structure and code reuse patterns that professional scripters need. John Resig's Simple Class inspired, jQuery.Class is a lightweight, but powerful class-like system that bridges the gap between jQuery's functional programming style and Object Oriented Programming.
Continue readingSet inner/outer width/height with jQuery Dimensions.Etc Plugin
You often want to animate or set an object to be a specific width or height on the page. But if that element has padding, border, or margin, it will probably take up more space than you expect. The jquery.dimensions.etc.js plugin lets you set and animate the outerWidth, outerHeight, innerWidth and innerHeight of DOM elements.
Continue readingGet Multiple Computed Styles FAST with the curStyles jQuery Plugin
Do you use jQuery's css or curCSS functions to get multiple styles on the same element? Don't you know this is slow? The JavaScriptMVC extracted curStyles plugin boosts performance when reading multiple computed styles on a single element.
Continue readingConvert Form Elements to JavaScript Object Literals with jQuery formParams Plugin
Want to quickly extract form data to a more usable format? Of course you do! We use JavaScriptMVC's formParams plugin constantly to turn form data into much easier to manipulate JavaScript Objects. We're releasing formParams standalone so everyone can save a little time on this extremely common task.
Continue readingcompareDocumentPosition plugin for jQuery
Being able to quickly compare two elements' positions in the browser is extremely useful for a variety of tasks. The DOM Level 3 specification describes the compareDocumentPosition method. It returns a bitmask with a whole bunch of useful information. But not all browsers support it :(
Continue readingAjax Fixtures Plugin for jQuery
Are you developing jQuery hotness so fast that the slow-poke server team can't supply you AJAX services fast enough? If so, you might be interested in the JavaScriptMVC-extracted jQuery.Fixture plugin. Fixtures simulate AJAX responses so you can keep developing JavaScript functionality even if the server's services aren't working. The fixture plugin is easy to setup and remove once the services are online.
Continue readingjQuery Default Events
Event Oriented Architectures (EOAs) are an emerging best practice when designing reusable JavaScript widgets. jQuery's trigger, triggerHandler, and jQuery.event.special[EVENT]._default methods have enabled widget authors to easily expose custom events to developers. However, these methods lack the scalability or expressiveness to enable powerful EOAs.
Delegate-able Hover Events for jQuery
Want to use live and delegate with hover events? Now you can! We are releasing JavaScriptMVC's delegate-able hover plugin. This plugin only works for the current 1.4.3 nightly release.
Continue readingDelegate-able Drag-Drop Events for jQuery
Have you ever wanted to use live and delegate with drag-drop events? Now you can! We are releasing JavaScriptMVC's delegate-able drag/drop plugins and extensions. These plugins only work for the current 1.4.3 nightly release.
Continue readingElement Destroyed (a jQuery Special Event)
When building jQuery plugins, it's a best practice to provide some way for the user to teardown the plugin, remove any event handlers, and set things back to a good state. Most plugins can get away with waiting for the element to be removed, but more complex plugins listen for events on elements outside the plugin's element (such as the document or window). For these, it's important to know if an element has been removed and to clean up the plugins leftovers.
Continue readingJupiter is Big
When I was out in DC at JSConf, I stopped by the Air and Space Museum. I was impressed by how huge Jupiter is when compared to all the other planets.
Continue readingMindjet Training
I was lucky enough to train some of the smartest engineers last week in JavaScriptMVC. Here's a shot of part of the group when I remembered to take a quick picture.
Continue readingToo Enterprisey?
A criticism often leveled against JavaScriptMVC is that it is too enterprisey. Here's how Wikipedia describes the term:
Continue reading
SAU, Window.Name, JSON-RPC
A few weeks ago, I went out to Chattanooga to give 3 days of JavaScriptMVC training to Southern Adventist University. I was blown away by the university's technology expertise. To my shame, I wasn't expecting a small college to have such sophisticated engineers. But, it wasn't that small! There are 66 sister school associated with SAU. SAU's problem was that each of those sister schools had their own way of doing things. There was almost no reuse. SAU's challenge was to create an architecture that would pave the way for reuse, where one school could leverage the application of another.
Continue readingJavaScript vs Silverlight
Recently, we've found ourselves part of a Silverlight vs JavaScript debate. I think that JavaScript is a better long term approach to web application development. But, I found myself stumbling the first time I needed to articulate my reasons. It was just a gut feeling. But after spending a few minutes sketching my thoughts, I've proved my intuition to my brain.
Continue readingAbout Jupiter
Jupiter is dedicated to making JavaScript an easy and enjoyable place to develop kick ass apps. We open-source everything and provide expert web application development, support, and training.