James Donaghue

I was recently contacted by Wei-Ling Chen of DZone about a great and free CSS resource that they have available: CSS Refcardz. It is written by Molly E. Holzschlag and it looks like a nice and concise reference for CSS visual models.

Here are some of the topics discussed: The CSS Visual Model, The Box Model, The Power and Problem with Floats, CSS Positioning, Core CSS Wrap-Up, Hot Tips and More.

It looks like a nice resource, I hope that you find it useful!

I have taken a stab at some documentation for Peppy. It can be found here. 

Please keep in mind that this is a first draft so there is still a lot to be desired, however, I have tried to address some of the most requested items from comments that I have received.  I have added a section detailing the API, and some other sections that are truthfully not complete yet.  I think that there is enough information, though, to help most get going.

More updates will be coming soon, so if you have specific requests please post them in the comments and keep checking back.

Thanks

Hi Folks,

I have been traveling so sorry it’s been a while since the last post.

JavaScript is a really cool language. One of my favorite aspects of JavaScript is closures. When designing a reusable piece of work, using closures is a great way to restrict pollution of the global scope.

You may have noticed that Peppy is wrapped in an anonymous function that executes immediately. Inside of this anonymous function I set only two global variables: “peppy” and “$” (”$” is only set if it doesn’t already exist). Everything else is wrapped up inside of a closure.

There are many useful patterns involving closures and one of them that you may have heard of is the Module pattern. If I were to write peppy using this pattern it would look something like this:

I chose not to use this pattern though because Peppy handles some follow up initialization stuff that needs to occur after the definition of Peppy and it just didn’t quite fit as cleanly within the module pattern.

Well that’s it for this post, I just wanted to write a quick one as I have been hard at work on putting together some documentation for Peppy as well as working on the next release.

Today, I am releasing the latest maintenance version of Peppy - 0.1.2. This includes fixes for the 9 test failures in Safari as well as the 3 test failures in Opera. Peppy now passes 131 unit tests in all of these browsers (and fails none!). Also, included in this release is the disabling of caching in IE.

To download Peppy please go here.

I am already working on the next release of Peppy (will include even more performance optimization). This should be available within a few weeks.

Thanks.

Well, the response to the initial beta release of Peppy has been wonderful. I want to thank everyone for taking the time to give your thoughts, comments and suggestions! Today, I just wanted to quickly highlight some of my short term plans for Peppy.

1. I am planning a maintenance release of Peppy probably tomorrow or Sunday. This will address the two main issues that came out from the post on Ajaxian.

• Disable caching in IE
• Fix 9 issues in Safari, 3 issues in Opera

2. I will set up source control and a bug tracking system sometime in the near future.

3. I will add documentation and give Peppy a proper home page. The documentation will provide usage samples such as how to use this with other libraries, etc.

Also, Peppy is release under the FreeBSD license (http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html)

Thanks again for all the great feed back. Keep checking back for more updates.

Today, I am releasing Peppy 0.1 beta! Download it here.

Peppy is a lightning fast CSS 3 compliant selector engine with no external library dependencies. Peppy can be used along side other libraries seamlessly.

As it stands now Peppy is faster¹ than all other major JavaScript libraries with DOM querying capabilities (Prototype 1.6.0.3, JQuery 1.2.6, MooTools 1.2.1, EXT 2.2, DoJo 1.2.0, YUI 2.6.0). It is faster² than Sizzle by John Resig and it also is cross browser (IE included). Take a look for yourselves, I have a profiling page set up here.

At 10k it is an ideal replacement for other excellent but bulkier libraries (whose feature sets span beyond DOM querying) when features additional to DOM querying are not needed in your web application. If you are designing your own JavaScript library or want to replace your existing libraries selector engine then Peppy is an ideal candidate.

Comments, both positive and negative, are most welcomed and desired. I want to improve this thing! Please take a look here.

Thanks.

¹ (MajorLibraries - excluding Sizzle) : 4x faster in FF3, 6x faster in FF2,
8x faster in IE7, 3x faster in IE6, 3x faster in Opera 9, 4x faster in Safari 3

² (results compared to Sizzle): 1.2x faster in FF3, 1.3x faster in FF2,
11.1x faster in IE7, 4.5x faster in IE6, 1x faster in Opera 9, 4x faster in Safari 3

Note : I have noticed that sometimes these results vary using Slickspeed, these result were all obtained running several times in each browser taking the avg for all runs. Also, tests were only run in windows Vista and XP.

Browsers used for testing: FireFox 3.0.3, FireFox 2.0.0.17, IE 7.0.6, IE 6.0.29, Opera 9.5.2, Safari 3.1.2

I have decided to enter the blogging world with (this) my very first blog post.

I plan to write about topics in software that interest me. I have also been working on several projects and as they near their release points I will reveal them here.

Coming soon is a lightning fast CSS 3 Compliant Selector Engine that will be released under an Open Source license. It is currently in the final stages for its first beta release.

I plan to release it within a week or so, so please stop by again to check it out!