I have been a developer for nearly 20 years and a web developer for about 10 years. Over the years, I have considered creating a blog to share the things I have learned (and am learning) about web design and development, but I never seemed to have the time. When I began learning about web development using Ajax and Ajax Frameworks, I decided to take the time to create this blog.
My intention for this blog is to focus primarily on Ajax Frameworks, but since web development requires knowledge of many technologies, I will occasionally write about things such as CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Flash, etc.
Lately, I have been using JQuery as my primary Ajax tool. Although I have used other Ajax Frameworks in the past (Dojo Toolkit, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Scriptaculous/Prototype), JQuery has thus far been the easiest to learn. In my first few posts I will discuss some of the JQuery Plugins that I have created. Some of these include: a plugin for Google Maps (jquery.imGoogleMaps), Form validation and submission (jquery.imValidateForm), Page Populater (jquery.imPagePopulate), and a plugin to create lists (jquery.imList).
While I am still learning about some of the other Ajax Frameworks, I hope that what I have learned will be helpful to others. Just remember, “When you can pull the pebbles from my hand…”
When I upgraded my imGoogleMaps JQuery Plugin, I had to create a custom control button on the Google Map. The Control allows the user to add a Street View Overlay to the map. To create the control, I had to assign a prototype object to the instance of the GControl object.
I finally found the time to upgrade imGoogleMaps JQuery plugin. When I first began the upgrade, my plan was to only add the handful of items that were requested by a few users (and fix a few bugs). When the upgrade was complete, I had incorporated the GStreetviewPanorama object and Street View Overlay into the plugin. I also added the ability to plot multiple addresses ajaxally via a json object and add a business name to the infoWindow.
I was surprised to find that the YUI Dialog does not have a onClose event. I have been working on a login dialog widget using the Yahoo User Interface Library. I want to display a message if the user closes the dialog.
I have been upgrading an web application for a client. I initially created the application using a custom php framework – spliced together however awkwardly, but it worked. In version 2, I included YUI 2.8, but have been using the same backend.
The site is nearly complete (ajax functionality, and database development), I decided that I needed a more structured php framework. I chose CakePHP primarily because I could bake the models, views, and controllers. With only 17 tables, The application is not very large, but the thought of creating models, views, and controllers for 17 tables did not sound exciting.
I could not bake on my Mac. I got an error, “Call to undefined function mysql_connect()”. I searched for hours trying to figure out why I was receiving the error, but to no avail. I think that I need to re-install PHP. Not going to happen. I instead decided to setup Cake on my Ubuntu box (See my post: Setting Ubuntu For Web Development).
I started back on a CakePHP intranet application that I haven’t worked on in a while. I received a ‘Missing Database Table’ error when I viewed the application in a browser. The table that was mentioned in the error had been deleted a few months ago and I no longer had a model, view or controller for this table. After a few hours of investigating, I found that I had to delete the cache files (app/tmp/cache) that were created when I initially baked this table.
After installing CakePHP on my Ubuntu box, I viewed the default home page in my browser and noticed that the page was not styled. Cake did not know the path to the CSS file because I had not enabled mod_rewrite. Although I could opt to setup CakePHP to work without mod_rewrite, I decided to enable it.
I created a JQuery Plugin, imValidateForm. As the name suggests, the plugin is used to validate forms. In this post, I will discuss how to use the imValidateForm plugin with CodeIgniter.
The following is a query to retrieve column names from a MySQL table:
SELECT COLUMN_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE table_name = ‘table name’;
One aspect of CodeIgniter that I don’t like is the amount of view files that I have to create. Although I create folders to group relevant views, I’m always searching through files to find the view that I need. To reduce the amount of files that I need for a project, I usually create a single view file to handle both inserts and updates to a table. But I had to create a CodeIgniter Helper function in order to make it work.
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