Rob Gravelle

A Roundup of Popular JavaScript Date Parsing Libraries: Datejs Welcome to the second installment in a series on Date Parsing JavaScript libraries. The idea to look for libraries specializing in dates came to me while writing an article on Date Parsing using JavaScript and Regular Expressions. I was delighted to find that there were a […]

A Roundup of Popular JavaScript Date Parsing Libraries: XDate Welcome to the third installment in a series on Date Parsing JavaScript libraries. The idea to look for libraries specializing in dates came to me while writing an article on Date Parsing using JavaScript and Regular Expressions. I was delighted to find that there were a […]

Testing for Empty Inherited JavaScript Object Properties Testing for emptiness in JavaScript, that is to say, when a variable has been declared but not assigned a value, is easy enough with primitive types like numbers and strings because of loose typing. That’s what lets you perform tests like if (variable) doSomething(); which rely on the […]

Just recently, I wrote about Jasmine 2.0 in my Testing DOM Events Using jQuery and Jasmine 2.0 article. It described how to utilize spies to verify that a given event was triggered and that it resulted in the expected action. While adequate for simple events such as a message being displayed and the like, spies […]

Do you remember when browsers each incorporated their own proprietary standards? This was when Netscape Navigator was at war with Internet Explorer for Internet supremacy. Developers, who were left having to design their sites for both browsers, would tell themselves that in time, Web standards would emerge and bring an end to the duality. Those […]

Using Jasmine 2.0’s New done() Function to Test Asynchronous Processes Just recently, I wrote about Jasmine 2.0 in my Testing DOM Events Using jQuery and Jasmine 2.0 article. It described how to use spies to verify that a given event was triggered and that it resulted in the expected action. While adequate for simple events […]

While writing an article on Date Parsing using JavaScript and Regular Expressions I was delighted to discover a bunch of JavaScript libraries that simplify working with JS dates. Had I thought of that while writing my own script, I might have saved myself a lot work! Now that I know better, I’d like to present […]

Testing For Variable Emptiness In JavaScript In general terms, a variable is said to be empty when it has been declared, but not assigned a value. In most languages, that equates to having a value of null. In JavaScript, unset variables are assigned a default value of undefined. But that’s only part of the story. […]

Targeting Specific Devices in your Style Sheets With the ubiquity of mobile devices, it was only a matter of time before CSS caught up to provide a means of targeting devices by screen size and/or by feature. Now, with media queries, that day has come. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that mobile […]

Date Parsing using JavaScript and Regular Expressions I recently wrote a script to parse emails on my online account for dates so that it could create reminders for article due dates. The experience made me realize the many difficulties inherent to converting a date string into a proper Date object. JavaScript’s Date(string) constructor can be […]

A lot of processes within a Web application are triggered by Document Object Model (DOM) events. These include button clicks, setting the focus on an element, document loading, unloading, and any other event resulting from a user action or the browser. That’s why any good Unit Testing Framework will provide methods to deal with DOM […]

Although there are a lot of good things that can be said about the new Application Cache (AppCache) specification, there is still room for improvement. One criticism that comes up a lot is its implementation is too inflexible. The crux of the issue lies in the way that the manifest file is declared as an […]