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Al MacDonald recently posted http://stage1.bocoup.com/blog/javascript-typed-arrays – which is an interesting look at the benchmarkable speed differences between FireFox 4’s Float32Array constructor and the traditional Array constructor. As expected, the Typed Arrays are definitively faster due entirely to native optimization: they only allow integer or floating point numbers (respectively to their Int or Float prefix); additionally […]

You probably know by now that JavaScript is getting a lot of upgrades at the moment. One of the upgrades that WebGL is bringing along for the ride is JavaScript Typed Arrays. A JavaScript Typed Array is very quick! It exists as a fixed block of memory that can be accessed with JavaScript, where as […]

Test262 is a conformance test suite for ECMAScript, the programming language on which JavaScript is based. Containing 36,103 individual tests at the time of this writing, Test262 ensures that different implementations of the language, such as the JavaScript engines in web browsers or stand-alone runtimes like Node.js or Moddable XS, agree on the minutiae of […]

Illustration by Sue Lockwood TC-39, the standards body that defines JavaScript, maintains a gigantic suite of tests for the language. The name of that test suite is Test262. When we started extending Test262 to cover brand new language features, we knew we were in for some surprises. Even so, we never could have anticipated the […]

Back in April I wrote about Bocoup’s excitement for the recently announced Tessel 2 in “Pushing NodeBots Into The Future with Tessel 2”. Since then, we’ve worked side-by-side with the Tessel Project to help them realize their platform vision for the next stage in the evolution of the Tessel. With shipping underway, we’re excited to […]

This post talks about the development of RapBot, my freestyle 80s battle rap generator. You might want to see it in action before reading on, and you can check out the source code here. For the past year I’ve been using the Wordnik API in my projects to generate random words. I’ve made extensive use […]

Since I joined Bocoup just a few short weeks ago, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time talking to Jory Burson. She’s the training coordinator here, and she’s everything you’d want in a training coordinator at a place like Bocoup. Most of our conversations have been focused on something we can’t help but notice: […]

Over the past 3 months Bocoup has been working closely with the Guardian Interactive team on the Miso Project, a set of open source libraries designed to expedite and simplify the creation of data-driven interactive content. We are excited to announce the release of the first of these libraries called Dataset. You can see the […]

Use the code below to try out everything that I talk about in this post, and check out the live demo over on code.bocoup.com. modified-x-axis-intervals-and-labels.js //based on the source of http://g.raphaeljs.com/linechart.html var options = { axis: “0 0 1 1”, // Where to put the labels (trbl) axisxstep: 16 // How many x interval labels […]

As I mentioned in Part I, the Web Worker API is available for use in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+ and Chrome 4+, however the implementations are inconsistant. This has been completely overlooked by every single tutorial I’ve found. The issue revolves around the accepted argument to postMessage() (from both the main window and the worker). […]

For those with short attention spans, here’s how you call the function: map(enumerable, mapFunction, callback, numWorkers); I wanted an easy way to divide up a parallelizable task with Web Workers, so I create a Worker enabled Map function for arrays and objects. It works just like the map function in your favorite functional languages, except […]