Software Developer Living in Niagara Falls
Most software projects need to talk to a database at some point – they usually do GET queries for data, update a field or create a record. In the past, people would write raw code that communicated with the database and built an object or some code representation of the data that they would manipulate. This lead to an incredible amount of duplicated code for every project that usually had some subtle bug that was present in all libraries. Continue reading
In JavaScript, it’s common to hear lots of strange terminology without a lot of description around what it is or what it does. I want to try and demystify what a self invoking function is and why you should consider them and the times when maybe you shouldn’t consider them. Continue reading
In the earlier days of the web, there was a battle between two scripting languages VBScript and JavaScript. VBScript, thankfully, eventually died and JavaScript became the dominant language for making really easy to use and interactive websites.
In the years since, JavaScript has become more and more used. Backend code can be written in basically any language, even in JavaScript, but the client side will almost always require a developer with some JavaScript knowledge. Every industry has a lot of javascript and some are even rewriting core functionality to use more. Surprisingly, even large banks and credit card companies are beginning to use JavaScript or Node in big ways. PayPal has been rewriting very large parts of their code base to make it more scalable and usable. Continue reading
In functional programming, being able to reduce is one of the fundamental concepts. Reduce is used to iterate through the values in an array and condense all of the values into a single value. Usually the value is a sum of all of the elements.
Normally, you would want to use a reduce method when you want to sum all of the values in an array and then use the total for some operation. For example, it might make sense to use a reducer when you want to get the total number of items in a shopping cart and determine the tax or determine how many items a customer purchased. Continue reading
In a lot of web applications, it can be really useful to detect whether the user is still active or not. For example, when a user is no longer active it can make a lot of sense to automatically log the user out or remind them that they’re about to be logged out. Continue reading
Merging objects together in JavaScript isn’t very difficult although there’s quite a few different ways that it can be done.
Note, I’m not covering deep cloning for the sake of simplicity although this can be easily done through most of these different methods.
It’s no secret that JavaScript is now all around us, most html forms are using JavaScript for validation and of course there’s now JavaScript on the server. This post covers how to get the query string from the current page’s url. Continue reading
Traditionally when somebody said JavaScript, they were talking about a language that just did stuff on the client side like form validation or the occasional animation or UI enhancement. For years now, JavaScript has been all of the rage. Most new technology startups are now using JavaScript on the frontend, and on their backend services. Continue reading
Over the last few years, Salesforce has made some really significant changes that allow JavaScript to increasingly be used. By using Salesforce’s AJAX toolkit it’s possible to do an incredible amount of customization to a standard Salesforce Page Layout without ever having to write any apex. Continue reading
In the past, there’s been so many times I needed to tell if an object was numeric. With the below function, it’s very easy to tell if an item is numeric.
//return false if blank, null, undefined or NaN.
function isNumeric(v) {
if (v == null || v == undefined || v== '') {
return false;
}
return !isNaN(v) && isFinite(v);
}
If your project is already using jQuery, you could always use jQuery.IsNumeric()
Ever wonder about how to Remove the Annoying VIP Zone Video from the Niagara Falls Review’s website? I absolutely love following local news, but I really can’t stand being forced to pretend I’m going to watch a video.
When I was looking at a site with the Chrome Developer Tools, it had a little error icon that said “Resource interpreted as other but transferred with MIME type text/javascript” when I clicked it.
I couldn’t figure out my error at first, but eventually realized I had for some reason had a script tag with a src assigned of blank and then had javascript between the source tags.
<script type="text/javascript">doSomething();</script>
A blank url or src is of course a reference to the current page. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out, but once I changed the page I realized the error.
Hope this helps!
Dates and DateTimes are difficult to deal with in most languages. The Date object is a datatype that’s built in the JavaScript language. In JavaScript, the biggest problem is that the browsers aren’t overly consistent in the way they have implemented the Date object and its APIs. Continue reading
It’s no secret that many of us that use javascript regularly love jQuery because it handles a lot of the cross browser issues and makes our lives so much easier.
The .ajax function makes use of caching by default, but we can override this by creating a function called .ajaxSetup and adding cache: false in the function.
$.ajaxSetup ({
cache: false
});
You can of course take advantage of this and create even more verbose .ajax calls. 😉
Magento is an insanely flexible system that has a lot of potential, but of course with this flexibility comes a lot of learning.
Adding a JavaScript file and a CSS file to a specific CMS page isn’t very difficult. We should always consider adding the JavaScript file or CSS file to the theme if we’re going to use it on more than one specific page. Continue reading
Coders at Work written by Peter Seibel is a fantastic book of interviews of fifteen very famous programmers. Audience of the book is clearly programmers with experience programming as the book can at times get fairly rich with technical details about compilers, IDE’s, etc. Continue reading
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception… “Component returned failure code: 0x805e000a [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]”
nsresult: “0x805e000a ()”
AdBlock interferes with the XmlHTTPRequest object and is known to sometimes break the way jQuery functions especially if the url triggers some sort of url filter.
You have a few options to resolve the solution:
jQuery in Action, First Edition is written by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and is probably the simplest and easiest to understand programming book available. Target reader is somebody that already is using javascript in projects and is looking to push the limits of their web applications by using jQuery and many of it’s great plugins.
I found the book and its appendices to be extremely well written. I found the examples to be superbly written and extremely usable in my projects: there aren’t a lot of examples on basic things like selectors but there are a ton of great examples on much more advanced concepts. An additional feature that I found really helpful was the interactive lab exercises that begin around chapter two.
As a reference, which I don’t think was the primary intent, it would be difficult to use the book as some of the API is randomly spread throughout the book. The random spread does make the book a lot better though, because each chapter definitely builds well upon the previous chapter.
I completely recommend this book and can only imagine that the Second Edition improves upon the First Edition. I haven’t really found much negative about the book other than wishing the API wasn’t spread out so much, but the index is very good.
In general, we never should have embed JavaScript inside the same file as the HTML markup and should instead place the JavaScript into an external file.
The content, presentation, and interaction code should all be separate to make your life easier as a website developer.
JavaScript and the respective frameworks have really began to gain traction over the last couple of years. I would argue that most of the JavaScript frameworks are excellent, and truly are great for the user experience and for the programmer experience.
Unfortunately, many of the JavaScript frameworks are quite large for a web page. jQuery, for example, minified is nearly 56KB. Personally, I wouldn’t use jQuery or another JavaScript framework for static pages that might only read an XML file or display a simple animation: frameworks really are elegant for web applications. The size of frameworks isn’t much of an issue for people on broadband (cable, dsl, etc), but now as web developers we are beginning to see iPODs, iPhones, Blackberries, and other smaller electronics beginning to view our websites where the size and download speed of the frameworks, and website markup can begin to create havoc.
First, we should move all of the JavaScript to the bottom of the body because each HTTP request for an external document will block the rendering of the HTML until downloading has completed. JavaScript according to the W3C can “appear any number of times in the HEAD or BODY of an HTML document.”
Web Developers should also minimize the number of HTTP requests by combining all of the JavaScript into one file, and all of the css into a single css file. The Yahoo developer blog contains some really helpful tips. Yahoo also provides an excellent plugin for Firefox/Firebug that provides some tips and debug-type of information.