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…”
I’m updating a project that I created using CodeIgniter. I have to add a combobox (select) to a registration form that contains state names. I did not want to create a static combo box, so I created a states table in the MySQL database that I’m using for the project. The states table contains three fields (state_id, state_abbrev, state_name).
I was trying to fill a dijit.form.combobox dynamically without using ItemFileReadStore, but it has proven to be quite a challenge. I was trying to fill the combobox from an array. It appears that Dojo’s combobox does not inherit all the attributes of a regular HTML combobox. When using just Javascript to dynamically fill a combobox, I made use of the ‘options’ attribute:
