AlexAitken.net

Thomas Fuchs is au­thor of the script.aculo.us user in­ter­face JavaS­cript lib­rary, a mem­ber of the Pro­to­type core team and a Ruby on Rails core alum­nus. As he puts it, ‘You’re us­ing my work every day, even if you’re not aware of it!’ His wife Amy Hoy is a de­sign­er, au­thor, and JS pro­gram­mer in her own right. To­geth­er they team to of­fer a full-day’s train­ing on ad­vanced JS de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment tech­niques that they de­liv­er via chat and video­con­fer­en­cing soft­ware from Vi­enna, Aus­tria.

It’s sometimes a satisfying thing when textbook case studies present themselves in real life. With some breaks in the continuum, I’ve been pretty serious about JavaScript code since about the time of Boston’s miraculous comeback against the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS. Only in the last couple of years, though, have I been turning my coding style from the functional to the object-oriented, and incorporating into it some of what I’ve learned from John Resig, Aaron Newton, and others on the forefront of the recent JS boundary pushings. One of the early lessons these guys have to impart is on JS closures. So when, in production code for a large financial institution’s online banking application, I ran across the very lines of code they use to illustrate the concept, bells went off and – to quote Jonesy from ‘The Hunt for red October’ – I ended up basically running home to Mama.