Ayman Hourieh

The main news piece for day 2 in the Firefox Summit 2008 is that everyone is now trapped in the small town of Whistler after that a rock slide cut off the highway that connects Whistler with Vancouver. Fortunately, nobody was injured because of this. However, clearing the massive boulders that are blocking the highway will take 5 days according to official sources. Since the summit ends this Thursday, most attendants need to go to the Vancouver Airport on Friday to catch flights to their home countries. The cause of this rock slide is unclear at the moment, but there are people in the summit who are speculating whether a company whose name starts with an 'M' is behind all of this. A bug was filed in Bugzilla to track the issue, and some of the currently-proposed solutions involve riding bears, taking boats, or taking helicopters. In reality however, we will most likely end up going through a different route that takes around 8 hours in a bus.

The Firefox Summit 2008 started today in the city of Whistler, BC, Canada. Around 400 contributors to the Mozilla project gathered to meet, share thoughts and discuss the 3.0 release of Firefox and plan for the next releases. I'm attending the summit as the Arabic localizer. I will post a daily highlight of the summit on my blog, so let's start with day one.

JavaScript is a fully-featured Object-Oriented programming language. On the surface, it shares syntactical similarities with Java and C, but the mentality is quite different. At its core, JavaScript is more similar to functional languages. Inside is a list of JavaScript tips, some offer techniques to simulate features found in C-like languages (such as assertions or static variables). Others are meant to improve performance and explore some of the more obscure parts of the web scripting language.

In the first section of this article I'll demonstrate how to create a drag/drop portal in a few lines of JavaScript code, using the excellent Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries. In the second section, I'll explain how to integrate this code into Drupal as a server backend for storing user settings. You may check the frontend here (tested with Firefox 1.5, IE6, and Opera 8.5), and download a reusable JavaScript Portal class and Drupal module for the backend at the bottom of this post.