Ajax and Ajax Frameworks

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…”

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gpDojoGallery: A Dojo Photo Gallery Widget

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

I added a new photo gallery to galleries.digitalvilliage.com. I created the Photo Gallery widget using Dojo Toolkit about a year ago for a project that I have been working on. I recently updated to give it more options than I needed for my project.

The gpDojoGallery widget can be set to display thumbnail images in the center, left, right, top, or bottom of the page. When the thumbnails are set to the center position, the dojox.image.Lightbox module can be used to display the large image.

The widget receives a JSON object that contains the image information (location, width, height, etc). I store the information using dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore, so it was easy to add a pics-per-page option just be limiting the number items to be read within the store.

?View Code JAVASCRIPT
if (this.picsPerPage) {
	request = imageStore.fetch({onBegin: startFetch, onError: fetchFailed, onComplete: initGallery, start: 0, count: this.picsPerPage});
}  else {
	request = imageStore.fetch({onBegin: startFetch, onError: fetchFailed, onComplete: initGallery});
}

The gpDojoGallery widget was fairly simple to create, but it has enough options to be a very versatile photo gallery. You can view demos on my digitalvilliage.com site. The widget (and demos) can be downloaded from GitHub.

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