Well folks, I’ve got to admit, it was a bit of a slow news week in the Javascript world. But rest assured, I didn’t come to write this post empty-handed.

Garbage Collection

This week, the Ajaxian/WebOS Developer Relations guys linked to a great in-depth article on Palm’s website about garbage collection in Javascript. It goes into a fair amount of detail about how and when GC runs, and also gives some good advice on how to keep GC from running at inopportune times and bogging down your UI.

Historically, Javascript developers have been able to get away with not worrying too much about GC. However, applications are getting more complex and at the same time as they’re running on less capable hardware (read: mobile devices). So as we increasingly ask our Javascript to do more with less, it’s becoming more important to become aware of what’s going on under the hood.

Let’s make a framework

For the last couple of months, the DailyJS blog has been running a series on how to build a Javascript framework from start to finish. Along the way, they’ve covered topics like API design and building a selector engine, along with more process-oriented topics like the most recent post on how to package your library.

There’s a lot of great info in those posts, so you should definitely head over to DailyJS and check out all of their “Let’s make a framework” posts.

Go native with Cappuccino

Recent betas of Atlas, the web-based IDE for Cappuccino development, have included a new feature called NativeHost, that allows you to export your application as a web app or as a cross-platform desktop application.

If you want to actually see what a Cappuccino/NativeHost app looks like, you can check out the brand new interface to Github Issues that was built with Cappuccino on the web or download the native version. Of course, you should also check out what the Cappuccino team has to say about the project, as well.

How to detect everything

Last night/this morning, Mark Pilgrim posted Appendix A of his Dive into HTML5 book. The appendix, titled: THE ALL-IN-ONE ALMOST-ALPHABETICAL NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO DETECTING EVERYTHING is an exhaustive list of methods for detecting browser support for HTML5 features with Javascript. Should you be inclined to roll your own feature detection instead of incorporating a library like Modernizr to do it for you, It’s an extremely valuable resource, and well worth bookmarking.