I like javascript.

There. That's out of the way.

dbucklin wrote a great post about 
coding as craft. I am not a craftsman. 
I hack things together. I don't even 
know enough to know whether my coding 
is ugly or full of security holes. I 
try to be as concise as possible and 
to keep it tidy, logical, and 
commented. That's about it.

What I really liked about dbucklin's 
post were the use-what-you-want-to-use 
comments. There's a general animosity 
toward javascript in gopherspace (and 
elsewhere), but I think it's 
misplaced. There's no reason to blame 
a tool for what people do with it. 
Javascript is not particularly 'heavy' 
or 'bloated.' You can definitely 
overload a site with it and it plays 
a significant role in tracking and 
advertising. But those results are the 
products of decision-making. They're 
not problems with the language 
itself.[1]

In any case, a couple of years ago, 
the unofficial Google News app (NewsG) 
for webOS died and I decided that I 
wanted to create a replacement for it. 
Yeah, I know. I'm on the wrong side of 
that one too! ;)

I hadn't programmed since the days of 
BASIC and Turbo Pascal, so the whole 
project was exploratory for me. It was 
a lot of fun and I derived a great 
sense of accomplishment from it. 

webOS apps rely on proprietary 
javascript frameworks called Mojo and 
Enyo, and neither is particularly well 
documented. It quickly became apparent 
that using those frameworks was going 
to be difficult for me -- and that 
learning them was going to take me 
into a dead end. I hoped to learn 
skills that would be transferrable to 
other settings in the future. Outdated 
mobile frameworks didn't really help 
in that respect. In addition, I didn't 
have my own VPS at the time, so my 
solution had to either run on the 
device or be hosted on my webhosting 
account. As a final consideration, I 
wanted the app to be easily portable 
to other platforms.

The solution to all of these problems 
was javascript. I worked through a 
great book called Eloquent Javascript 
and -- with the help of w3schools and 
a whole bunch of helpful people on 
sites like Stack Overflow and Stack 
Exchange (not to mention an RSS feed 
renderer called feed2js) -- I managed 
to cobble together a web app that 
displays Google News RSS feeds with 
the option to open the links through 
Google's mobilizer to speed up 
rendering on very old devices. The 
entire site is written in html, css, 
and javascript. It's neither heavy nor 
bloated. The proof is that it works 
quickly on my old HP Pre3, which has 
one of the worst browsers ever made. 
As a result, I have to conclude that 
it takes a LOT of javascript 
(gargantuan amounts!) to weigh down a 
modern browser.

There were real benefits to creating a 
javascript-based web app in this 
manner. The first was that it was 
relatively easy to create webview apps 
to install on different devices and 
then format the site differently on 
each device via browser detection and 
css. The second is that I never have 
to update the mobile apps. When 
something breaks, I just update the 
website code, and the users (there are 
at least two of us!) don't have to 
download app updates.

You can try out the site here:
http://darkstar.x10host.com/news_beta

It will work best in your desktop 
browser or on webOS or BlackBerry OS7. 
There are no stylesheets targeting 
Android or iOS devices so it will 
probably look terrible on them.

The mobile apps are here:

webOS:
https://github.com/Shuswap/NewsZ-Build

BlackBerry OS 7:
http://darkstar.x10host.com/Launchers/NewsZ/NewsZ.jad

And I shared the webOS web app 
template I created here:

https://github.com/Shuswap/template_webview_app



[1] I am painfully aware that I just 
made the standard anti-gun-control 
argument about javascript. But you 
know it's true. Javascript doesn't 
kill browsing. People kill browsing.