Tag Archives: Software engineering

JavaScript Objects Coding Style Reviewed

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JS Objects

Once I posted about JavaScript object coding style. Back than I made the analogy with PHP array coding style. In breve it’s useful to format the arrays in PHP simply like that:

$data = array(
	'key1' => 'value1',
	'key2' => 'value2',
	'key3' => 'value3',
	'key4' => 'value4',
	'key5' => 'value5',
);

Note that there is a trailing comma after the last key/value pair. This is not a syntax error and helps you add new elements to the array with no fear to forget the comma. This coding standard is quite well known in the PHP community, but in fact writing JavaScript objects can be “translated” to something very similar. The only problem is that the trailing comma in JavaScript will result to an error, especially in Internet Explorer, so it is important to remove it.

var obj = {
	key1 : 'value1',
	key2 : 'value2',
	key3 : 'value3',
	key4 : 'value4',
	key5 : 'value5'
};

The problem is that when you’ve to add one key/value pair, you’ve to add the comma after the last pair. This actually makes it useless.

Better Solution

There is another way, much better I think, that may help you more when adding new pairs to the object.

var obj = 
	{ key1 : 'value1'
	, key2 : 'value2'
	, key3 : 'value3'
	, key4 : 'value4'
	, key5 : 'value5'
	};

In this example you can simply copy/paste the last pair and change the key and value, or you can simply can continue writing the way the object is constructed.

Thus you don’t have the problem with the last comma and syntax errors.

Diving into Node.js – Introduction & Installation

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Why I Need Something Like Node.js?

First of all the use of some software is needed not because of itself, but because of the need of some specific functionality. In my case this was the need of real time news feed. Of course there is a way to make this without Node.js, as I’ll describe later in this post, but there are several disadvantages. However to begin from somewhere, let me explain what is Node.js.

Introducing Node.js

Perhaps the best way do describe what is Node.js is from its about page.

Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the “hello world” web server example above, many client connections can be handled concurrently. Node tells the operating system (through epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, or select) that it should be notified when a new connection is made, and then it goes to sleep. If someone new connects, then it executes the callback. Each connection is only a small heap allocation.

…

In general Node is a program using the Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, which in turn is a program that can parse and execute code written in JavaScript. V8 is a very very interesting project itself. First of all from Google have developed this engine especially for one of his products – their browser Chrome. It pretends to be and by no means is one of the masterpieces of Google. It is fast and reliable engine, written in C++ and JavaScript, as Wikipedia’s page says. Actually this code is open source and can be embedded in whatever application written in C++. Thus you can have in your application a JavaScript engine. Continue reading Diving into Node.js – Introduction & Installation →

The Better Way to Unset Variables in PHP

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Don’t know why, but most of times I see the PHP unset() multilined with a only one parameter!?

unset($var1);
unset($var2);
unset($var3);

But as you can see from the PHP doc page of unset() this method takes optional parameter count.

void unset(mixed $var [, mixed $var [, mixed $...]])

So perhaps a better solution can be:

unset($var1, $var2, $var3);

It’s at least single lined!

Flexible JavaScript – Replace in a String

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Here’s yet another example of the JavaScript flexibility. You can simply call .replace() on every string and pass a regex as a parameter!

var str = 'my simple string';
str.replace(/ /g, '-'); // now 'str' will contain 'my-simple-string'

Returning JSON in a Zend Controller’s Action – Part 2

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In a reply from my latest post after following the comments, there is a much elegant solution to this use case. Simply by changing the output with a JSON helper. This also changes the content-type of the returned response.

$data = array(...);
$this->_helper->json($data);