Garbage collection, in a very real sense
In previous posts (part 1, part 2) I established the possibility that there were advantages to making Javascript more functional, to bring it in line with CSS and XSL. I didn’t say what these were, particularly, but I then provided a few bits and pieces on top of jQuery to make Javascript just that: functional [...]
If you’re here, then you probably came from here, and you want to make Javascript more functional. If you didn’t come from there—and this is getting a bit like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, isn’t it?—then you might want to go there first, to see if you want to be here.
So: functional Javascript. Not just functional, but [...]
There are three main technologies that your browser employs to present HTML for you: XSL, CSS and Javascript. The first two of these are functional: that is, they turn your incoming (X)HTML documents into a set of functions, or behaviours if you like. Because CSS isn’t generally considered a language, let alone a functional one, [...]
Mark Mandel wrote his own version of Coldfusion’s XmlTransform() function, using the underlying Java transform classes. Although one of his annoyances—that XmlTransform() won’t take any parameters—has been solved in CFMX7, XmlTransform() is nonetheless a slow operation, as the transform engine has to be cranked up, the XSL compiled, the transform effected and then everything garbage-collected, [...]
If you’re working with XML, as I currently am, XSLT can sometimes be a godsend. Something that would take ages to do in a structured, procedural way can be reduced to two or three lines of functional XSL code.
So it was with a growing sense of consternation that I noticed that adding XML namespaces to [...]
I’ve been asked a couple of times recently, as part of separate projects, to split the results of a SQL query on whitespace within. Simply put, how does one go from:
foo
foo bar
quux
blort wuu spong
to the expanded form:
foo
foo
bar
quux
blort
wuu
spong
efficiently and cleanly, only using SQL? (In case anyone’s worried, I’ve scrubbed the data sets of any personal details [...]