A lot of game genres, such as racing and platform fighting games, rely on a gamepad rather than a keyboard and mouse for the best experience. This means these games can now be played on the web with the same gamepads that are used for consoles. A demo is available, and if you don’t have a gamepad, you can still enjoy the demo using a keyboard. As with all experimental technologies, results with the Gamepad API are unstable. However, by using it (and providing feedback), you are sculpting the future of the technology. This represents a huge opportunity for the game industry!
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What the hell is isolate scopes, transclusion, linking functions, compilers and directive controllers? In this article, Nicolas Bevacqua will cover all of that, and more! If the figure looks unreasonably mind-bending, then this article might be for you. This article is based on the AngularJS v1.3.0 tree. Are you ready? Let’s do this!
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You’ve probably heard about ECMAScript 6 (or ES6) already. It’s the next version of JavaScript, and it has some great new features. The features have varying degrees of complexity and are useful in both simple scripts and complex applications.
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My hope is for you to see that Make is an automation/orchestration tool that can be used in place of other modern build tools, and will help to strengthen your understanding and ability to use the terminal/shell environment (which is a big plus in my opinion, and helps open up many avenues of technical progression). Whole books have been written on the topic of Make and writing Makefiles so Mark will leave it up to you to investigate further beyond this post if he manages to kindle your interest.
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Nicholas C. Zakas started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. He couldn’t get the idea of a linter with pluggable runtime rules out of his head. He had just spent a bunch of time learning about Esprima and abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and he thought to himself, “It can’t be all that hard to create a pluggable JavaScript linter using an AST.” It was from those initial thoughts that ESLint was born. ESLint is a JavaScript linter that has learned from our collective past of JavaScript development. It is committed to not only being a great linter out of the box, but also to being the center of a great and growing ecosystem of plugins, shareable configs and parsers.
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The number of Flux implementations available can feel overwhelming, but overall Jim Cowart finds it an encouraging development. Solid and successful patterns like Flux will, by their very nature, encourage multiple implementations. In this article, Jim will take a look at some of the key lessons he has learned about React and Flux. Whether you’re new to React and Flux, or going as far as building your own Flux implementation, Jim thinks you’ll not only enjoy this journey, but find some thought-provoking questions and wisdom you can apply in your own endeavors.
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Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a server for an API. We’re now seeing a possible return or, rather, more of a combination of both architectures happening. Web architecture definitely goes through cycles. We started out rendering everything on the server and shipping it down to the client. Then, JavaScript came along, and we started using it for simple page interactions. At some point, JavaScript grew up and we realized it could be used to build large applications that render all on the client and that use the server to retrieve data through an API.
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As the volume of data on the web has increased, web scraping has become increasingly widespread, and a number of powerful services have emerged to simplify it. You can use Node.js to create a powerful web scraper that is both extremely versatile and completely free. A basic understanding of Node.js is recommended for this article; so, if you haven’t already, check it out before continuing. Also, web scraping may violate the terms of service for some websites, so just make sure you’re in the clear there before doing any heavy scraping.
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From simple charts to fancy infographics to complex timeline animations, data visualizations are popping up all over the Internet. However, as in any other area, once everyone gets on the train, distinguishing yourself from the pack becomes hard. There is virtually no limit to what you can do with the physics of data visualizations. Create column charts and make them fall like dominos, or make pie charts roll, bounce and more. You can make objects in charts and maps roll, spin, bounce, change shape and morph in ways that will capture the viewer’s attention much more quickly than regular static or even interactive versions!
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Static analyzers look at code and find problems before you run it. They do simple checks, like enforcing syntax, and more holistic checks, like making sure your functions aren’t too complex. Static analyzers also find errors that you can’t find with testing, like instances of == when you meant ===. In large projects and on big teams, you’ll be happy to have a little help finding those “simple” bugs that turn out to be a lot less simple than they looked.
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