When Apple announced Mac OS X Lion, their tagline was “Back to the Mac” as they were bringing some features from iOS into the desktop-oriented Mac OS. In the JavaScript world, a similar thing has happened: innovations in the Node.js space can be brought back to the browser. These innovations have made JavaScript development faster and cleaner with command-line tools and the npm packaging system.

The Graphite and statsd systems have been popular choices lately for recording system statistics, but there isn’t much written beyond how to get the basic system set up. Here are a few tips that will make your life easier.

While working on Careplane recently, I ran into a problem that was made easier by JSONPath. I was already enjoying the ability to test my JavaScript with Node.js, Jasmine, and other npm packages. It would be nice if I could get the same package system I have with npm and use it with my client-side JavaScript.

While working on Hootroot and Careplane, I found myself getting frustrated with the way I was having handling events. Over time, however, I stopped fighting the language and learned a pattern that I believe is easiest to test and read.

Lately, I’ve been working on a Google Maps mashup that calculates CO2 emissions for automobile, bus, and rail trips. Since Google Maps has such a great JavaScript API, I decided to write the application almost entirely in JavaScript. Thus, Carbon.js was born!

Recently, we spiffed up some of our emitters with enhanced documentation using Rocco, a Ruby port of Docco. We combined this with github’s ability to set up static html pages for a repo. By setting up a branch called gh-pages, Github will serve any html files in that branch. We use this feature to display Rocco-generated documentation of our carbon models (check out the flight emitter for an example).