PhantomJS is cloud-friendly as it runs well on Amazon EC2, Heroku, and other server platforms. But what if you want to use PhantomJS without the hassle of setting up and maintaining a server? The solution is to use IronWorker, an elastic task queue service. As a service from Iron.io, IronWorker permits running background tasks with… Read more »
Monthly Archives:: July 2012
Most Popular JavaScript Tokens
After you have seen the distribution of JavaScript keywords and statements, it is time for another fun statistics. Now we will take a look at the histogram of various JavaScript tokens. What is a token? According to ECMAScript specification (see Section 5.1.2): Input elements other than white space and comments form the terminal symbols for… Read more »
Behind Esprima: Fast, Readable, Heavily Tested, Error Tolerant, Forward Looking
Every now and then I got someone asking me why I did bother to create Esprima at all. There exists already several great JavaScript parsers written in JavaScript. Most likely, it is easier to use the existing parser than writing a new one. This post summarizes my reasoning behind the birth of Esprima (in no… Read more »
Dolphin Engine for Android: First Look
Dolphin is a popular alternative web browser for Android. Until recently, it is essentially a custom browser interface on top of the system Android WebKit library. This is now changed with the new Dolphin Engine which promised boosted performance and improved HTML5 support. How does it stack up? Ice Cream Sandwich on Steroid Preliminary analysis… Read more »
Mac OS X: Tracking Disk I/O Activities
Many modern laptops come with an SSD (solid-state drive) instead of a traditional magnetic disk. Because it is silent, it is not possible to hear the spinning sound anymore as the disk enters a period of high activities. This can be bad, often a continuous I/O access indicates a problem in the running system. For… Read more »
JavaScript Code Editing with Autocompletion in Eclipse Orion
Version 0.5 of Eclipse Orion, the web-focused IDE, has been released. One of its improved features is a better editing autocomplete, known in the Eclipse world as Content Assist or within Microsoft Visual Studio users as IntelliSense. The logic to drive the autocompletion is made possible because the parser understands syntax errors in the source… Read more »
