The most popular entry I've written at Near Infinity has been the JavaScript Particle Engine. It had limitations because I used transparent images and only made one color -- black. I recreated the fire demo for a talk -- Advanced Web Graphics with Canvas -- that I gave at the Rich Web Experience. I'll post the slides, sample code, and some more demos in upcoming entries.

I was reading a blog entry at Web Reflection that outlined some obscure solutions to common JavaScript patterns.

I thought that entry was interesting, but I'm not sure I'd use them because of code readability and maintenance. It did get me thinking of some other ways to obscure simple tasks.

The web community has been buzzing about the new Ajax server, Jaxer, from Aptana. If you haven't heard see John's, or Dion's Ajaxian posts about it.

Now, overall, I am really excited about the future in this project. The problem I had is all their examples use synchronous XMLHttpRequests. We already know why this is unfriendly to users.

I spoke at the Reston, VA No Fluff Just Stuff conference again this past weekend. The talk was on JavaScript security covering topics including:

• Cross-site scripting (XSS)
• Cross-site-request forgery (CSRF)
• JSON Hi-jacking
• JavaScript portscanning
• JavaScript and CSS History "Go Fish"

This is a short tip that I found useful for testing complex JavaScript objects using crosscheck. For more information on crosscheck see my article on JavaScript Unit Testing with Crosscheck.

Testing instance methods can be a pain if the functions use instance variables and the object is heavyweight. In my case the constructor did a lot with the DOM that I didn't want to mock. Instead of invoking the function through an instance of an object, I called it statically.