rmurphey

srchr: Crowdsourcing JavaScript wisdom

Posted

UPDATE: The deadline for completing your submission is April 16, the day before JSConf. If you're at the conference, join others in the hacker lounge to see what they did! I've been working on a blog post about using classes and pub/sub for structuring jQuery applications, and I had in mind a pretty simple demo app that I was going to build. I also wanted to show a version of the app that was built in a more traditional way, and I'd been pondering whether I should write that version myself, or see if I could cajole someone else into doing it. And then, a moment of inspiration: rather than a contrived counter-example, why not get a whole bunch of developers to show how they'd tackle the problem, so we can all gain from the exercise and learn from each other? I tweeted my idea, and five minutes later I had a dozen volunteers and counting, which is downright awesome and in hindsight shouldn't be surprising. It's so rare that we get to see multiple approaches to a moderately complex problem -- it's much more common to see horrendous code and bitch about it :)

The project

I've put together a mock/spec for a small, strictly client-side application that uses YQL to search for content and then displays it to the user. (Click on the image to see it full-size.) Think of this as an exercise in creating a product, not a site that you finish and walk away from -- the goal is to create an extensible, modular application. That said, there are no "right" answers here: the point is for you to demonstrate how you, personally, would approach the problem.

Presenting your solution

I've created a github repository for the project that contains nothing more than some documentation, the mock/spec, and a few stub files and directories. You should fork this repository to get started. If you create some CSS that you'd like to share, I'd encourage you to send a pull request so I can make it available to everyone; this isn't an CSS exercise, so no one should labor over that part if they don't want to. I may very well write some basic CSS myself in the next couple of days, but it's late :) Finally: please comment on this post if you have any questions!

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