A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `jquery`

¶ Using YUI compressor in a web project

Last year, I moved our small programming department from using JDeveloper and editing shared files directly on a network drive to using Netbeans 6.x and a proper version control system (Subversion).

After the initial learning curve, this has all been going swimmingly. I merged my first development branch into the trunk yesterday, and this branch just so happens to dovetail nicely into the whole point of this post, which is the YUI compressor, an open-source javascript and CSS minification tool developed by Yahoo’s YUI team.

§2692 · September 22, 2008 · 7 comments · Tags: compression, css, Internet Explorer, Java, javascript, jquery, web design, work

¶ Creating an admissions dashboard

This entry pertains to work done in the context of my employment. Please remember, however, that any opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or co-workers.

The Problem

Admissions needed help. They had been moved from their former product, Exeter, to Banner’s native admissions module. But Banner’s interface stinks, and there was no decent way for counselors to do, well, anything. They relied on daily reports run out of an Excel pivot table by the executive directory of admissions, and therefore they lived on paper. The counselors needed a better way to get their work done and stay on top (figuratively speaking) of their recruits.

Enter my department. It fell to us, after some discussion, to build a tool that would be initial for undergraduate counselors, to let them slice and dice their data as needed. After a pilot run, it will gradually be expanded to include graduate and transfer admissions, as well as reporting tools for directors and and other muckity-mucks.

§2354 · September 11, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: code, design, javascript, jquery, personal, web design, work, xhtml

¶ Blockquote metadata extractor 1.2

My little blockquote title|cite extractor for jQuery has been updated just slightly when it appeared to have funny results. It may have to do with the element.attr() changes introduced in jQuery 1.2.6.

It’s not a particularly disastrous bug or anything, but I’ve altered the code to check string lengths instead of looking checking for null.

Get it here.

§2075 · June 16, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: aside, javascript, jquery, software

¶ Adventures in California

I write today safely back in the Midwest after spending about 5 days in Anaheim, California (for which see my previous post). My purpose in California was the annual Sungard Summit, a very large gathering of customers of Sungard Higher Education, mostly Banner users. It’s a markedly different kind of conference than the ones I’ve historically been to, which consisted mostly of people trying to get a particular product to work. Most of the schools at Sungard already have the product working, and so it really was a sort of brain trust, and interesting in a lot of ways.

§2040 · April 17, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: jquery, personal, technology

¶ SunSpider

Last December, I read Jeff Atwood’s write-up about SunSpider, a new Javascript benchmark created by the makers of WebKit/KHTML.

The world of Javascript is an interesting one right now; it seems like most major browsers are on the eve of a major new release, many with new (& improved JS engines). With WebKit’s porting to Windows in Safari (and eventually Konqueror, I imagine), yet another player has thrown his hat into the arena. Javascript is, as Jeff rightly says, the lingua franca of the web: everything is javascript-[based|dependent] today, and rich interfaces are now the norm, rather than a pleasant surprise.

As a web applications developer, I’ve banged by head against javascript and various and sundry browser implementations at work, and worried about performances, both now and in the future. Standardizing on a common library (cf. jQuery) helps, although the performance or functionality of jQuery plugins don’t always match those of home-grown counterparts. For instance, Brian McAllister’s Unobtrusive Table Sort Script far outpaces the popular TableSorter script for jQuery. I ended up implementing the latter at work, simply because of the sheer size of tables we render, and the relative slow speed of many of ours users’ browsers.

§1956 · January 15, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: Apple, browsers, Firefox, javascript, jquery, open source, software