A List Apart

Issue № 375

The care and feeding of JavaScript.

The Design of Code: Organizing JavaScript

by Anthony Colangelo ∙ 18 Comments

Well-designed code is much easier to maintain, optimize, and extend, making for more efficient developers. Three high-level, language-agnostic aspects of code design are key to achieving this nirvana: system architecture, maintainability, and reusability. All three may be attained via the module pattern, whose extensible structure lends itself to a solid system architecture and a maintainable codebase. Anthony Colangelo shows how to craft our code into well-organized components that can be reused in projects to come.

Writing Testable JavaScript

by Rebecca Murphey ∙ 13 Comments

As our JavaScript takes on more and more responsibilities, we need a reliable codebase—one that is thoroughly tested. Integration tests focus on how the pieces of an application work together, but don’t tell us whether individual units of functionality are behaving as expected. That’s where unit testing comes in. And we’ll have a hard time writing unit tests until we start writing testable JavaScript. Rebecca Murphey explains how to save time in the long run by writing cleaner application code and testing, testing, testing.

More from A List Apart

Columnists

Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev

You Can’t Do Everything

In any given day I can find myself reading up on a new W3C proposal, fixing an issue with our tax return, coding an add-on for our product, writing a conference presentation, building a server, creating a video tutorial, and doing front end development for one of our sites. Without clients dictating my workload I’m in the enviable position of being able to choose where to focus my efforts. However, I can’t physically do everything.

From the Blog

Matt Mullenweg on Yahoo-Tumblr

“We’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain.”–Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

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