Sometimes, I really love just to HTML-code an interesting concept. That's exactly what I was asked to do by the fine folks at Windup Design.
The site is now up: www.cottageinternational.com
Have a look. Great concept by Windup Design, and nice careful coding by yours truly ;)
Aptana is still-in-early-development Eclipse-based (and therefore is written in Java) IDE for Web programmers.
It supports JavaScript, HTML, CSS syntax highlight, JavaScript syntax checking, auto-completion and even shows browser compatibility information for JS commands and CSS. You can work on levels of projects, as well as single-file editing. The IDE also supports various AJAX libraries, and you can even create projects based on AJAX libs you choose (incl. Prototype, Scriptaculous, Rico and many many more)
Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. Do, do yourself a favour and check Aptana out.
The only drawback for me is that it only supports UTF and Roman encodings, and none of Japanese-specific ones. Yeah I know in this age all sites should be created in UTF, but just.. I don't know.. can't get used to it. Being lazy I guess.
Man.. I wish I would have access to the cache from which these people get the stuff they smoke ;)
There is a very useful chunk of code for paginating data in Spry, available at Raymond Camden's blog. You might want to check it out.
Adobe have recently released its Spry Ajax framework for public beta-test by developers and I've been playing with this baby for a while. And here's some kind of report of what I have learned.
Some lessons are learned the hard way.
I was doing another AJAX based system today, and faced a problem where the Ajax.Updater updated text was shown correctly in every single browser except for Safari.
Like I wrote in one of my previous posts, one should check if the output to browser from a script is sent in UTF-8, because this is the encoding AJAX supports. So, in my case with Japanese-language web-sites, I have ordinary pages encodings set to ShiftJIS. So, when I output text which is supposed to be used to replace web-page contents using Prorotype's Ajax.Update call, I convert it from ShiftJIS to UTF-8 before outputting as the result of AJAX call.
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Some systems need some extensive testing to be done :) Here's how you test when you have too much time on your hands ;)
Although I didn't get to use Ruby on Rails in my job due to various factors I had to consider, I took some interesting concepts for the framework, namely the ROR-style flash alerts. These alerts are stored in cookies and are transferred between pages even on redirects. Pretty cool idea, so I wrote a replicate for this functionality in PHP.
Demo and the source code can be viewed here
Have fun :)
I'm starting to use AJAX more in more in CMS I develop. And that exactly what I was doing today. Had to "optimize" some site for speed. I have created the CMS for the site, using AJAX in parts, but was a little bit too lazy to add AJAX everywhere. So the pages we loading.. well.. fast, but not fast for the client, so I was told to make some optimizations.
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