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…”
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.
I’m updating a project for a client that I developed using CodeIgniter. One of the updates involves adding a text editor. I decided to use TinyMCE. Integrating TinyMCE with CodeIgniter was easier than I thought.
Create a folder under the js folder and name it tiny_mce (/js/tiny_mce). Download TinyMCE and place the files in the tiny_mce folder.
I’m working on a project using Dojo which requires a wysiwyg editor that is more robust than Dojo’s Dijit.Editor. After doing a bit of research, I decided to use TinyMCE. This wysiwyg editor is very robust, has great documentation and is the editor that WordPress uses. Integrating TinyMCE did not appear to be difficult, but I also wanted to create a TinyMCE Dojo widget, so that I could easily reuse TinyMCE in other Dojo projects without having to remember how to set it up.
