Web
Force Page to Reload on Browser Back in Rails
On my current project we do some heavy modification of the DOM via JavaScript. This causes some issues when the users navigate via the back button – quite often the page will not contain the changes the user made, or the information they see will be out of date. (Our users are also unfamiliar with websites and tend to find this confusing)
Populating form values through a link in Rails
Today I was asked to help with creating a link on a website that should take the user to a different page where a form should be filled out based on paramaters supplied through the link URL.
Scrolling hides content on Mobile Safari
Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been working on a mobile website for a hybrid iPhone app. This has been quite a learning experience, both from the technology point of view (we used Spine.js mobile) and from the User Experience point of view.
Six months with Spine.js
I have spent the last six months on a project where we are using Spine.js as one of the main technologies. Spine is a JavaScript library that allows you to build client-side-heavy applications with the MVC pattern using CoffeeScript.
Rails Session not being persisted
I ran into an issue today around the session object in Rails. The session object works pretty much like a hash and allows you to store data between requests. A number of persistent stores exist, but overall it acts like a hash that is persisted between requests.
User Login done right
Today I was involved in an estimation session when the issue of user login came up. I was reminded of how such a straightforward piece of functionality can actually be rather tricky to implement correctly. (An estimation session is where we look at a list of features and try to assign a relative complexity to each)
What’s up with StackOverflow search?
I was recently had a strange experience while introducing a colleague to the magic of StackOverflow – what an amazing website. They arrived on the scene and showed us how Q&A should be done – I’m a big fan. However, I tried to search for a question I knew I had seen before – regarding namespaces in JavaScript – and for some reason I couldn’t find it.
What’s new in HTML5
I just finished ‘HTML5 for Web Designers’ – the first book in the A Book Apart series. While I have read a few articles on HTML5 I was surprised by some of the new features in Web Forms 2.0. I’m going to try and test out some of these new features in this post.
3D Tic-Tac-Toe with HTML5
I recently helped to organize a programming contest where you were required to write a Tic-tac-toe game using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You then had to host your solution on jsFiddle.
Web Passwords 101
Web authentication seems to be a bit of a hot topic at the moment. In the last couple of weeks I have seen quite a few articles regarding authentication and the storing of passwords, culminating in the uproar following the Gawker network being compromised.
Why FIFA.com crashed
If you’re soccer fan like me (the World Cup is only 2 weeks away!) you probably encountered considerable frustration in the past week. This is due to FIFA ticketing system. FIFA allow fans to buy tickets through the FIFA.com website (which generally works pretty well), but in the past few weeks there have been a number of outages leading to some seriously annoyed customers. This culminated on Friday – FIFA had announced that 150 000 extra tickets would go on sale by 9 AM, but their website simply couldn’t handle the extra load and 24 hours later the problem still hadn’t been resolved.
Things I’ve learnt as a Web Developer
I’ve been a software developer for almost 5 years – the last year and a half of that I’ve spent doing web development. I don’t pretend to even think that I’m anything close to an expert in web development. The following is simply a mixture of common mistakes I’ve come across as well as some concepts I’ve learnt which I’ve found greatly beneficial in my career as a web developer.
How to use View Models
I’ve had quite a few discussions around view models and the different patterns around using them in MVC. A while back I read an interesting article by Steve Michelotti about the subject and I would like to expand on his arguments.
Use View Models instead of FormCollection
I have recently been spending quite a bit of time on StackOverflow and I noticed that quite a few of the MVC-related answers make use of the FormCollection class. If you’re unfamiliar with this class, here is an example of how it gets used:
Debugging JavaScript errors
I have noticed that quite a few developers are unaware of one of the simplest methods of finding JavaScript errors in your page. JavaScript exposes an event handler that fires whenever a JavaScript error occurs in a page. Using it we can suppress all JavaScript errors on the page or display an error dialog.
Put JavaScript includes at the bottom of your page
I was reading the jQuery Cookbook yesterday to try and sharpen my JavaScript skills. Within the first chapter the book highlights something which I’ve never given much attention to – where in your page to include your JavaScript files. Here is an excerpt.
The search for a better View Engine – ASP.NET MVC
I have been evaluating the different view engines available for ASP.NET MVC. In my last two posts I evaluated Brail and finally dismissed it since it didn’t match up to what I was looking for.
Using Brail View Engine with ASP.NET MVC
In my last post I started to take a look at the Brail View Engine in ASP.NET MVC. In this post I’m going to take a quick look at some of the other details of using Brail.
Can we help the client not get stuck on Visual Details?
I guess we’ve all been through this – you put all your effort into creating a great new feature that the client has requested, double-check everything to ensure that the requirements are met, work late hours to get it done on time even though the timelines were a complete joke and finally show the demo to the client. You stand back and await the obvious gratitude that must follow the delivery of such a fantastic piece of software…