Sam-I-Am's Builder Blog

dijit.byNode and firebug fun

2008-03-07T08:31:00.002-06:00

Here's a little tip if you're working with dojo widgets. In firebug you can select an element in the HTML view. Back in the firebug console, your selected node is available as $1 So, $1.tagName shows you the element name, etc. If you've got dojo on your page you can use anything dojo has provided in the console, and if you're using dijit, you also have that stuff too. So, in the HTML view click

Restoring SVN repositories from disk - a story

2008-02-22T23:03:00.006-06:00

I recently had to move off a company laptop I'd been using for a while, and (thanks to the flu) didnt have much time to do it. So, I backed up those directories I knew had any personal projects and data in and crossed-fingers I'd be able to get what I needed out of there when the time came. One of the directories I got housed my subversion respositories (I'd been using the flat-file db option).

A Parable

2008-01-15T12:45:00.000-06:00

A man was asked to do some renovation on a house. He worked steadily at it for several weeks and finally called his client to come take a look around. He said, "I was able to keep a lot of the original flooring. I got a good match for the wood and finish where I had to patch and extend the floor. I'm nearly done. I just need to pick up my offcuts and sweep up." "Oh good" said the client. "So

dijit.Declaration and its mixins

2008-01-14T16:23:00.000-06:00

I love the dijit.Declaration widget introduced into the dojo toolkit around version 0.9+. It lets you declare a new widget class inline in your html - which can be very useful, especially when you want the widget templateString to be dynamic output from the server. Just a little tip - I had been getting a m._findMixin is not a function error when instantiating widgets from my Declaration. If

Regexp to match only html filenames and directory names

2007-11-30T11:42:00.000-06:00

I've been working on a script to create filtered directory tree listings. It can be configured with both include conditions, and exclude conditions. If something passes the include filters, it then checks to see if its explicitly excluded. For example, I want to exclude cgi-bin, but include all other directories and files. So its useful to have a good catch-all pattern for including only the

Simple Clocks with the Dojo Toolkit

2007-11-28T01:47:00.000-06:00

Something I was playing with - this page shows a couple of javascript clock/countdown treatments. None are as whizzy as the dojox.gfx (vector graphics) clock you might have seen around, or your various dashboard widgets - but this is just dojo core + 6k (uncompressed) of code.

string.replace with substitution by function

2007-11-27T23:57:00.000-06:00

It may or may not be news to you that in Javascript you can do: someString.replace( /\w+/g, function(match) { return "blah" } ); Which in this case turns "the original string" into "blah blah blah". Your function is passed the match, and you return whatever you want. That's pretty handy, as you can run the match through transformations, or even use it to lookup or generate some

TAE keynote and CSS layout

2007-10-24T08:25:00.000-05:00

the Ajaxian folks are doing their little summary of the past year or so as pertains to Ajax. One of the "trends" or opportunities they observe is doing layout using javascript. CSS got a panning. Now I understand that CSS layout is complex - no argument there. But doing layout in javascript is hardly new and proven to be a dead-end - at least with current browsers. In Dojo 0.9 the widget and

Sortable list with dojo 0.9

2007-09-06T20:34:00.000-05:00

This is a quick proof of concept of a sortable, data-store backed list (using dojo 0.9). The store (a dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore instance) does the sorting. Each list-item has an id, that is mapped to the store item identifier. So when the re-sorted list comes back I just look up the list-item node and appendChild it to move it in the list. The store has 52 items (its a list of states) and

Adobe AIR tour

2007-07-21T03:12:00.000-05:00

I made a quick trip to Dallas to catch the Adobe AIR bus tour there. You know, it was pretty interesting. I was braced for a 4 hour long vendor sales demo, and it kind of was that, but with enough hands-on detail to keep my attention. Plus, it looks like a sweet product. A few misunderstandings that got cleared up for me: AIR is specifically the runtime. Think the .NET runtime - its a

Moving your Firefox profile

2007-07-11T15:34:00.000-05:00

Little tip. You can easily move your FF profile directory to another local drive/directory e.g. thumb drive, or a backed-up directory. In my case it was to a directory that doesn't have every read/write scanned by anti-virus software. (I can see how this might be prudent and all, but it was making for a very slow browsing experience on my pc.)

RefreshAustin is 1yr Old

2007-02-22T08:33:00.000-06:00

I'm prompted to post because almost a year after we disbanded the Austin Web Standards Meetup, and merged with RefreshAustin I'm still getting email from meetup.com with people signing up for future web standards meetups in Austin. Folks, the group is alive and well, we meet at least monthly, but we now fly a "Refresh" banner instead of the web standards meetup one. The Refresh format is simple

Terminal funkiness with ActiveState perl

2007-01-12T10:32:00.000-06:00

I just finally got on top of an annoyance I've had for a while: on my work machine I use MKS Toolkit - which provides a lot of the common unix tools for developers using windows. It provides its own Perl build, but I've been using ActiveState's for a while, and didnt want to complicate synchronizing my work across the different machines I use perl on. An unhappy side-effect of installing MKS

Javascript shell with Rhino

2006-10-19T16:11:00.000-05:00

The Rhino javascript interpreter (from Mozilla, sister to SpiderMonkey) has an interactive mode: C:\dojo\buildscripts>java -jar lib/js.jar Rhino 1.5 release 3 2002 01 27 js> print('boo'); boo js> The Rhino jar is a part of the dojo distribution, so if you've got dojo (from SVN, not the pre-built releases) you already have it. The Scripting Java page from Mozilla has these and other details.

Soft-wrapping long words

2006-09-01T16:19:00.000-05:00

The issue of long, non-breaking words like urls has been around for a while on the web - and the impact this can have on layouts and other places where width is constrained for whatever reason. I've been going back and forth on this, and dug up and old test page on No-wrapping and Soft-wrapping. This has some test cases using , and the soft-hyphen character . The results aren't

Re: Has accessibility been taken too far?

2006-08-28T13:08:00.000-05:00

(Jeff Croft posted this provocative article which seemed to tap a common feeling that accessibility is a pain in the ass, strictly optional and web designers should be cut some slack) If you wade through the slop of the first round of comments to this post, there's actually some reasonable debate that follows. Jeff came out saying he wanted to provoke discussion and (eventually) seems to have

"Surveying OS Ajax Toolkits" article on infoworld

2006-08-17T00:20:00.000-05:00

This is well worth a read. Unlike most reviews I've seen, this author obviously spent sometime with each of the libraries he includes - enough to get a meaningful impression of the strengths and weaknesses. For me, he's right on the money with Dojo, YUI, Rico, Atlas. I differ a little on GWT, but in truth it sounds like he spent more time with it than I did. Being a dojo guy at present, I think

Krugle - open source code search engine

2006-06-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

I bumped into one of Krugle's developers at the Ajax experience conference. Looks like they just came out of beta and are open to the public. This is sweet, I can't emphasize enough how useful this is already proving. 90% of all code (I reckon) is boiler-plate, but by the time you've tracked down an implementation (and possibly ported it to your language of choice) its easier (say, 75% of the

Javascript conflicts and portlet namespaces

2006-05-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

First - javascript doesn't actually have "namespaces". But the idea is there - unless functions, objects and variables are designated otherwise, they exist in the global scope - properties of the window object. In a portal - where portlets might want to include script libraries to facilitate interaction within the portlet - there's a risk of conflicts with objects using the same name being

Playing nice with others in javascript

2006-04-26T20:50:00.000-05:00

Andrew Dupont has written a very interesting article on Prototype, and the recent $() extensions that allow things like $(someelement).hide() and so on. This is actually a really nice solution. It's syntactical sugar without actually extending the element itself. Andrew argues that as an object oriented language, its reasonable to want to be able to extend objects like HTMLElement in javascript.

WCAG 2.0 (as compared to section 508)

2006-04-24T14:50:00.000-05:00

I've been really impressed with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. This is a big improvement in the way the guidelines are presented and worded that I think will make adoption much much more likely. This here page answers the inevitable question: how does WCAG 2.0 line up against section 508? On one hand it adds specifics and details: sucess criteria and techniques for achieving success. On the other WCAG

Accessible maps at ALA

2006-04-20T20:45:00.000-05:00

This is a nice write-up of making a point-map (a map with information relating to points on that map) in a semantic and accessible manner. I read a lot of articles, and rarely feel compelled to blog them. I was impressed with this one though. It doesnt shy from diggging right into the details, and does an admirable job of working through some complexity to present a real, viable solution. So many

Object vs. View-centric apps (RoR vs. PHP)

2006-03-09T17:40:00.000-06:00

This post starts out as an account of trying out PHP and Ruby on Rails to build a simple app, and comparing the experience. The thread builds though into an interesting discussion of differing approaches to web application development, and differing needs from the framework you use.

Drupal recipes for a simple site

2006-02-16T18:17:00.000-06:00

This is a great thread that invites suggestions on how to build a simple "brochure" kind of site with Drupal - in the interest of getting people started quicker with Drupal. In amongst the meta-babble, there's some clear walkthroughs of how to achieve the goal - this is just the kind of stuff that's had me stumped these last 48 hours.

Charles HTTP Proxy

2006-01-25T09:16:00.000-06:00

Java (cross-platform) HTTP/S proxy for debugging and working with HTTP sessions. At first glance it looks to compare favorably with Fiddler in some aspects. It will do throttling for low-bandwidth emulation, act as a reverse-proxy, and has various reporting/monitoring possibilities. Shareware - giving it a whirl.