Third-Party JavaScript

Summary

Third-Party JavaScript guides web developers through the complete development of a full-featured third-party JavaScript application. You'll learn dozens of techniques for developing widgets that collect data for analytics, provide helpful overlays and dialogs, or implement features like chat or commenting. The concepts and examples throughout this book represent the best practices for this emerging field, based on thousands of real-world dev hours and results from millions of users.

About this Book
There's an art to writing third-party JavaScript—embeddable scripts that can plug into any website. They must adapt easily to unknown host environments, coexist with other applications, and manage the tricky security vulnerabilities you get when code and asset files are served from remote web addresses. Get it right and you have unlimited options for distributing your apps. This unique book shows you how.
Third-Party JavaScript guides you through the ins and outs of building full-featured third-party JavaScript applications. You'll learn techniques for developing widgets that collect data for analytics, provide helpful overlays and dialogs, or implement features like chat and commenting. The concepts and examples throughout the book represent the best practices for this emerging field, based on thousands of real-world dev hours and results from millions of users.

Written for web developers who know JavaScript, this book requires no prior knowledge of third-party apps.

What's Inside

Writing conflict-free JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

Making cross-domain requests from the browser

How to overcome third-party cookie limitations

Security vulnerabilities of third-party applications

About the Authors

Ben Vinegar is an engineer at Disqus, a third-party JavaScript commenting platform. Anton Kovalyov is a software engineer at Mozilla. They are third-party applications experts whose work has been distributed on millions of websites
Table of Contents

1. Introduction to third-party JavaScript
2. Distributing and loading your application
3. Rendering HTML and CSS
4. Communicating with the server
5. Cross-domain iframe messaging
6. Authentication and sessions
7. Security
8. Developing a third-party JavaScript SDK
9. Performance
10. Debugging and testing

Ben Vinegar is a Software Engineer at Disqus, a third-party commenting platform served on over 1,000,000 blogs, online publications, and other web properties, including CNN, MLB, Time Magazine, and IGN. Before joining Disqus, Ben was a Development Team Lead and go-to JavaScript developer at FreshBooks, a leading web-based invoicing service.

Anton Kovalyov is a Software Engineer at Disqus, and has guided development on the Disqus commenting widget since the company's earliest days. He maintains and contributes to a number of open-source JavaScript projects, including JSHint, a code quality tool, and Hiro, a testing framework for third-party JavaScript applications.