Nathan Strutz posted a cool tip using regular expressions to speed up coding which uses a regular expression to convert a single line list of variables into something actually useful.
You have a list of values on lines and you want to want to apply some code to each:
first_name
middle_initial
last_name
phone
country
state_province
citySelect the lines, and use your IDE's find/replace tool with the regex option. In Eclipse, this is just CTRL+F and check the checkbox. Use this as the search pattern:
^(.+)$
This regex says to select any line with at least one character in it and store it in a character group.
Some code like this would be the replace pattern:
querySetCell(myQuery, "$1", "");Replace them all and your code will be generated in an instant. The regex will drop each line's content into the $1 backreference.
That's a tip I'll have to remember.
Ajax Rain blogged about my jQuery Field Plug-in. If you like my jQuery Field Plug-in (official site) make sure to go vote for it on Ajax Rain!
I was trying to find an Eclipse-based color picker that worked as a view this afternoon. I can't believe nobody has created one, but from the looks of my Google searches no one has. It would really be great to have a color wheel with the features of Adobe's Kuler available right from Eclipse.
If anyone knows of a really good color swatch/picker for Eclipse, please let me know.
However, I did come across ColorCop in my search—which I'm going to try out and see how it works for me. There's no installer and it's free, with an option to donate via PayPal if you find the program useful.
In the past I've blogged about some free Windows-based Diff tools—like ExamDiff. However I recently came across WinMerge—an "Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms."
I've only been playing around with it for a couple of days, but I'm very impressed so far. It does a very good job visualizing the differences in files and has a lot of configuration options (such as how to interpret whitespace.) You create patch files, merge the changes together and even compare folder contents.
The feature I really like is Windows Explorer Context Menu integration. The context menu allows you to select two files in Windows Explorer and right-click and select the "Compare" option and instantly get a diff from those two files. There's also an option called "Compare To" which allows you to select a single file and then you can explore to another folder highlight a second file and select the "Compare" option to compare those two files. I really like this option. For me this is generally much more convienent than open the program and using an "Open" dialog to compare two files. I just find when I need to compare two files and I'm not already in Eclipse, then I'm probably looking at the files in Explorer—so the context menu integration is extremely convienent.
I've been working on our development server at work to try to help streamline some process. This included upgrade Subversion and Apache to the latest versions and installing Trac (so we can better track software issues.)
In order to really simplify being able to give developers and contractors access to the appropriate areas, I wanted to try and simplify the process by configuring Apache to use Windows Authentication. This allows us to control who has access to what, just by making them members of the appropriate groups.
Since I'm new to Apache, this whole process has taken longer than what I wanted—but I certainly learned a lot in the process.
Yesterday I was writing some jQuery code and I thought I came across a bug—until I realized it was a bug in my way of thinking and not with jQuery.
What I was trying to do is to dynamically append to the body tag some html that looked like this:
As part of Google's Caja project, they have released a JSON library (for JavaScript) that looks like it's very solid. For more information on the Caja project, check out this Ajaxian article.
Raymond Camden recently asked on his blog How can you timeout a session in an Ajax-based application?. Most of the comments on the entry relate to doing some kind of server-ping, but my suggestion would be to just let your application tell your Ajax code when the session actually expires.
The concept is to use HTTP response headers to inform your Ajax request when the session has actually expired. This allows you to do everything in one single call, without having to worry writing other code. Besides you should be adding some failure code to your Ajax calls anyway, so this fits right in with good Ajax practices.
There are two basic approaches you can take. Using a "custom" response header or sending back HTTP status code to indicate the user is no longer authorized to view content.
Yahoo! has just released a new Firebug plug-in called ySlow. I just finished installing it and playing around with it for a few minutes and it definitely looks like it could be one of those must have web developer tools. It provides the following:
The Performance Report card is pretty slick. It provides lots of tips on improving performance—such as ways to minimize HTTP requests, removing duplicate tags, adding expiration headers, etc.
I've been working on some code for a contracting client which involves a really cool drag-n-drop interface for building forms on-the-fly. While working on the project, I ran into an issue in IE6 when dragging a <div /> element that form fields and there values had been changed by the user, the values were not properly reflected when I'd copy the node using the cloneNode() DOM method.
It turns out IE 6/7 doesn't properly clone some form elements when you use the cloneNode(true) and the form element is a checkbox, radio or select element. My suspicion is this is because MSIE stores the element in a non-XHTML way (if you do an innerHTML on the source element you'll see that checkbox elements have a "CHECKED" attribute with no value.)
I was able to work around the issue by doing the following:
Apple has released a beta version of Safari 3 today. The biggest news is that it includes a Windows version of Safari. Hopefully they're aren't substancial differences between the Mac & Windows versions. I'll be glad to finally be able to test sites in Safari, without having to get to a Mac.
Go get Safari v3 for Windows (Beta) now.
I've been meaning to blogged about this for a couple of weeks and just haven't gotten around to it, so I thought I'd do it now so I can get rid of the e-mail in my inbox. :)
Here's a pretty cool jQuery implementation of Tetris. Pretty neat to seem something totally recreational done with jQuery. I've been thinking about just trying to put together some small, cool, mostly useless examples using jQuery just to show off some of the things you can do with a 19k JavaScript library. :)
A couple of cool tidbits on the jQuery front.
Remy Sharp has written a nice, clear, concise entry on demystifying jQuery's this object. He does a really good job explaining the differences in what this means depending on the context of what you're doing. This, no pun intended, is one of the things that can be a little confusing when you're new to jQuery since the this keyword can either be a pointer to the current DOM element or a jQuery object—depending on the context of your code. Remy's write up should help to clear this up for any new jQuery users.
Ralf S. Engelschall has a released jQuery Plug-in for cross-site AJAX. His plug-in allows you to communicate to a 3rd party domain in a similar manor to the $.getScript() call. The new function he introduced is called $.getScriptXS(). He's even added support for callbacks, so you'll know when the script has loaded. Very nice!
I wanted to post my presentation files for the demo I'll be giving at Spring <br /> Conference 2007 tomorrow morning. This file contains the Powerpoint Presentation, plus all the example file (plus some that I probably won't have a time to get to!)
I probably went overboard on the examples—I seriously doubt I can get through them all in 60 minutes, but hopefully you'll find the source code commented well enough that even if you don't set through my presentation, you can still follow what's going on.
On a recent project I was working on, I needed an "autocomplete" form field that could do both local data array and AJAX lookups. After doing some searching, I came across Dylan Verheul's jQuery Autcomplete plug-in.
This plug-in did a lot of what I needed, but was still missing some of the functionality I required. So, I just modified the library so it worked the way I needed it to. Here's a list of the changes/enhancements I made: