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Ask HN: Who's got good Javascript?

4 points by slackerIII ↗ HN
As part of my continuing eduction, I like to poke around sites and see how they are using JS. To help me optimize this process, does anyone have any opinions about which sites have "good" Javascript? By good, I'm primarily looking for getting the most functionality out of the smallest number of lines of still comprehensible code. Thanks!

7 comments

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nostrademons
Google, but they compress everything, so good luck understanding their code.

I'd actually check out the source to some of the major JS libraries: JQuery, Prototype, OpenLayers, etc. Most sites build off them, but the sites that know what they're doing will be packing/minifying their JavaScript, making it a bit hard to read.

tmilewski
They also obfuscate it. Understandably so.
nostrademons
It's actually not obfuscated by design - the main goal is to reduce latency and bandwidth usage. It just so happens that this means single character variable names and no whitespace, which is also fairly hard to read.
wenbert
i suggest that you go to chatrooms. #jquery #javascript in freenode are good places. i'm sure that there are guys out there who can help realtime
jgfoot
Look at the things John Resig has been doing. In addition to founding jQuery, he has written a lot of other good JavaScript code. Also, his blog, ejohn.org, discusses other JavaScript code he admires.
thaumaturgy
Not sure what qualifies as "good" JS, but there's a halfway decent photo gallery in JS at http://davidmckayphotography.com/

The code hasn't been obfuscated or compressed, and most of it is fairly straightforward and readable, except for the parts where the deadline started creeping up on the project. There the code gets a little ugly/hacky. AFAIK, IE 6, Safari, Firefox 2/3, etc. etc. all like it fine.

I wrote it, and I'm not particularly proud of it, but I've received enough (local) requests for it that a version 1 is in the works.