Rob Gravelle

5/28/13 Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. ~Author Unknown Remember when you wanted to associate an event handler to a mouseclick, you would assign it to the element’s onclick event, as in mywidget.onclick = myhandler;. This became problematic when another method also wanted to get in on the click action since […]

5/22/13 In the Scripting Made Easier with the Eclipse JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT) article, I demonstrated how to utilize the Eclipse JSDT plugin to enhance the development of a Static Web Project. It adds a JavaScript project type and perspective to the Eclipse Workbench as well as a number of views, editors, wizards, and builders. […]

5/20/13 I recently wrote an article entitled Test Asynchronous Methods Using the Jasmine runs() and waitFor() Methods. In it, I presented how Jasmine’s runs() and waitsfor() methods are utilized in the testing of asynchronous processes. I’m a big fan of Jasmine because of its ease of use and and overall awesomeness. Nonetheless, it isn’t perfect. […]

Working with HTML5 in Eclipse Juno 5/14/13 Since Helios release 2 of the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers added support for HTML5 development, many web developers have embraced Eclipse as their editor of choice. In the Create an Static HTML5 Web Project in Eclipse article, we saw how to setup a static HTML5 Web […]

4/25/13 The Eclipse IDE has become so popular for Java development that it was only a matter of time before it was extended for HTML and JavaScript as well. With regards to the latter, the JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT) plug-in supports the development of JavaScript applications as well as JavaScript within web applications. It adds […]

 I never gave much thought to the DOCTYPE tag because my HTML editor always included it in the page template. It wasn’t until the arrival of HTML5 that I noticed how much it had changed since version 4. Around the same time, I also noticed that my browser – Internet Explorer 9 (there I said […]

Eclipse has been the editor of choice for Web Application Development for a while now – especially for Java-powered multi-tiered apps. That being said, there are many flavors of Eclipse that target more straight ahead Web projects, such as those that feature JavaScript, or a collection of static pages. The Helios release 2 of the […]

In the Testing Ajax Event Handlers using Jasmine Spies article, we saw how the use of Jasmine spies is an excellent way to test asynchronous Ajax calls where we don’t care about the practical implementation of the HttpXmlRequest or the network connection. However, there are times when that is precisely what you want to verify! […]

A little while back I noticed that my version of Eclipse only had a JUnit Suite class template for version 3. In case you were unaware, JUnit 4 differs significantly from JUnit 3 because it uses annotations. In looking for a way to change the class template, I discovered that these are dynamically rendered through […]

A Guide to Eclipse Templates Templates are stored blocks of code or text that can be accessed quickly via a key combination. They can save you a lot of time when coding by eliminating the need to type the same lines of code over and over again. Eclipse already has a whole bunch of predefined […]

3/15/13 The Arrays class is part of the Java 2 Collections Framework and contains numerous static methods for representing and manipulating arrays, allowing them to be manipulated independently of the details of their representation. Among other things, it contains methods for sorting, searching, copying, and the toString(), which allows you to output an array as […]

A little while ago, I wrote about an exciting new JavaScript feature called WebWorkers. These offer developers the first real shot at developing truly multi-threaded application code, much like what is available in Java. Unfortunately, they are not widely adopted by browser vendors. Having said that, there are plenty of methods in JavaScript today that […]