Well… Until now I was trying to stay away from JavaScript. My aversion started somewhere around 2000. At this time I was webmaster at Opole University, and I was doing redesign of it pages. I tried to make some JS enabled pages, but results were not astonishing ;-)) I remember hard times with I tried to make it browser independent.
So I stayed away from JavaScript next few years. Until yesterday. When I was jogging I got idea to write some mashup with Google Maps. So I started reading some JS tutorials, Google Maps API documentation, and… Looks like JS is no such bad thing ;-)) Sure, last 6 years have changed a lot. Maybe I’ve changed or browsers, or both. Anyway now learning JS is a bit easier.
As a training I started with calculating distance on Google Maps (do I need Google Maps for dummies or really there is no built-in way to measure distance?). Starting from examples from API documentation I got to this point: http://nhw.pl/distance/. I hope calculations are finally correct. I promise next time to remember convert degrees to radians, before calling Math.cos ;-)) Well nothing special, but I’m proud, since this is my first JavaScript application. Now I will mix it with Ruby on Rails, and finish my mashup idea.