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Google Releases Open Source JavaScript Tools

Posted by timothy on from the see-not-evil dept.

Dan Jones writes "Google has open sourced several of its key JavaScript application development tools, hoping that they will prove useful for external programmers to build faster Web applications. According to Google, by enabling and allowing developers to use the same tools that Google uses, they can not only build rich applications but also make the Web really fast. The Closure JavaScript compiler and library are used as the standard Javascript library for pretty much any large, public Web application that Google is serving today, including some of its most popular Web applications, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. Google has also released Closure Templates which are designed to automate the dynamic creation of HTML. The announcement comes a few months after Google released and open sourced the NX server."

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My gawd by prozaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    its either javascript, flash or silverlight.

  2. Apache v2.0 by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seams silly to mention that it's open source without giving the license. Btw It's not copyleft, allows linking from other licenses and is GPLv3 compatible

    --
    IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
  3. Re:My gawd by RichardJenkins · · Score: 5, Funny

    in the web you have to wait 5 years for the crap old technologies to drain out after the new better one comes out.

    Pah! Optimists...

  4. Re:Closure/Clojure/closures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sounds like a real clojure-fuck.

  5. Lego-like by Art3x · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Closure Library has a lot of useful-looking classes and functions, like for working with Arrays, Dates, or the URL. They're divided into short files, so that you can use just the parts you want and not have to download one big file.

    jQuery has definitely been a great library, especially at finding things in the DOM. And I think its API for handling events is easier (definitely less to type) than this. But it doesn't have all of the things that this has --- short helpers that probably I would end up writing on my own (and already have started to).

    I'm also interested in the UI Widgets like an Autocomplete text field. I've been waiting for the jQuery UI team to finish that one widget for months, but for some reason their development is so slow!

    Standard Disclaimer about JavaScript:

    1. 1. JavaScript is a nice language.
    2. 2. Writing JavaScript to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera is a nightmare like no other.
    3. 3. Mainly it boils down to writing JavaScript to work in (A) Internet Explorer and in (B) browsers that are not Internet Explorer.
    4. 4. The "core" JavaScript is really nice: dynamic typing, super-short syntax for hash tables, arrays, regular expressions; dot-chaining of members and methods.
    5. 5. The browser API, or "DOM", part of JavaScript is different in IE than in the rest, and this, I think, is the main reason it's a pain. But jQuery and other libraries smooth this over.

    Like has been said, watch the Google Video "JavaScript: the Good Parts" to elaborate on this. And if you hate JavaScript but are forced to write it and haven't read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, it's the best book on JavaScript and one of the best O'Reilly books period.

  6. Re:My gawd by Mr.+DOS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is this modded funny? Apparently someone's forgotten that IE6 was released in August 2001; it's taken just over eight years for its market share to be superseded by another browser, and it's still firmly entrenched in some corporate environments.

          --- Mr. DOS