Journal 10 - reflection of other journal comments

I think we all worked the problem in such a way that we made sure that one block of code was working before we went on to the next. This much we all had in common. I separated the elements - - validation, then responding to a post-back with validation errors, then responding to a post-back without validation errors. Jamie separated his code in a slightly different way, but nevertheless worked on it in blocks, using success with one block as a sign to continue. I'm still comfortable with my approach and think I would tackle the next problem in the same way.

I did not think at the time of doing the class exercise of writing pseudo code until Jamie mentioned it in his blog. I think this would be worthwhile and would help to identify all of the elements up front. There's nothing worse than having to go back and re-work an element because it doesn't fit with how you've chosen to handle things later in the program.

Week 10 - Part 1

I set up the validation first and made sure that was working before I even thought about the rest of the tasks. When I was getting the proper error messages, I then made sure that I could return the value back to the text box. The final thing I did was to present the finished product - - the greeting card.

In every assignment, it’s important to me to score lots of little victories because I’m still so unsure of my coding skills. So, I usually code one element and then test it. I don’t move on until I get that one element working. So, I think that the approach I took is my preferred method of accomplishing these kind of tasks and the approach I would follow with other projects.

journal entry - repost

In Lab 4, a php include file could have worked great to post back the greeting in the text box. The example in lab 4 was a simple greeting but the nature of the exercise lends itself to being done on the web server.

In Lab 5, the validation for the room measurements and carpet choices could (and will be done in lab 9) as a php include. The calculations for cost could also be done server-side with php (and will be in lab9).

There isn’t any practical application of php for Labs 1 and 2. Although the rollover sub-menus could have been done server-side in lab 3, this application is not appropriate except done client-side.

Journal Entry - week9

In Lab 4, a php include file could have worked great to post back the greeting in the text box. The example in lab 4 was a simple greeting but the nature of the exercise lends itself to being done on the web server.

In Lab 5, the validation for the room measurements and carpet choices could (and will be done in lab 9) as a php include. The calculations for cost could also be done server-side with php (and will be in lab9).

There isn’t any practical application of php for Labs 1 and 2. Although the rollover sub-menus could have been done server-side in lab 3, this application is not appropriate except done client-side.

Journal Entry 8

Lab 3: Roll-over sub-menus
This feature to a web page’s navigation is best done via client-side scripting. The functionality it provides is a nice feature but if client scripting was turned off, it wouldn’t prevent the user from navigating through the site’s various pages. It wouldn’t make sense for this functionality to be scripted server-side. Frankly, the user would never wait long enough on a mouseover for the request to go round trip to the server and back and a sub-menu to be displayed.

Lab 4: Collecting Form Data and writing output to a page

The nature of this lab was simple in that information from text boxes was gathered and sent as a greeting to the client in another text box.

For this simplistic exercise, a server-side scripting solution does not make sense because there isn’t any real functionality provided by the greeting and it wouldn’t be worth the wait of a server round-trip just to get the greeting. Things would be different if the greeting was displayed as a result of a successful login or the confirmation of other important input. So my answer to this question is that it could have been done server-side and would have been necessary to do server-side if the functionality it provides is critical to the task being performed.

Lab 5: Carpet Estimates

The carpet estimation example is appropriate for a server-side script because the entire purpose of the screen would be lost if the user’s browser did not run scripts. The image swap would still be coded for client-side as would the validations. But, the estimation would be returned by a server-side script. It would be practical to perform the estimation server-side and it would be better because it would guarantee that all visitors to the page got the information they desired.

Journal Entry - Week of 4/4/05

PHP Alternatives

All three of these PHP alternatives do pretty much the same thing. They can all interface with databases and deliver dynamic web pages.

PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language)
A weakly typed language commonly used to develop interactivity on web sites. A very popular tool because its open source, dependable and without worry that its support will vanish. PERL is full featured and powerful but is not considered that difficult to learn - - in fact, can be mastered in a manageable time frame. And, you can build programs and even entire systems using PERL and you can do so quickly.

PERL link


COLD FUSION (CF)
Cold Fusion mark-up language is based on tags and includes SQL (not CF statements) to access data from a database. Variable values can be easily inserted in the output by just referring to them. Its syntax is simple and tag-based - - a lot like html - - and has a powerful IDE. The Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) uses fewer commands and the commands are more intuitive than ASP or other languages. For example, handles the output - - just what you would expect. CF studio comes with all of the IDE tools you would expect but also includes a debugger. But CF is not free - - or the free version of it is so limited that its not very useful.

Cold Fusion Link 1
Cold Fusion Link 2


ASP
Microsoft’s response to PHP and CF is ASP. Interspersed within the html, it uses either VB or Jscript for the actual code. The language is weakly typed. ASP can be used to interface a database with a web server. These scripts can be executed directly by the web server (as opposed to CGI which were executed by the Operating System) and thus have lower overhead due to the reduced number of calls to external interpreters. ASP’s primary advantage is its use of COM objects that can be created simply and easily. And, since ASP uses VB Script, whose syntax is similar to Visual Basic, it is simple to maintain in terms of finding programmers. And, ASP includes many built-in objects. The most prevalent criticism of ASP is directly at towards the instability of IIS - - not really a criticism of ASP as ASP can run on non-IIS web servers.

ASP article

Journal Entry - Week 6

The javascript application I would like to learn more about is working with timed events. Timed events with text and/or pictures are interesting if done well (and tacky if done poorly).

Here is a web site with timed text messages that I think has an interesting presentation.

http://www.notredame.org

My best guess is that this is a timeout function and here is a tutorial about using the setTimeout property of the window. There are three examples on this site of using the setTimeout property.

http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=try_dom_window_settimeout
http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=try_dom_window_settimeout3
http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=try_dom_window_settimeout2

I think that the page that I selected is a good example of a timed event that starts ‘timing’ on the page load event. So, I would put the function in the page load event. The function would include a timer (x seconds) at which time, the display would change. I think I would use an array to store the various text messages and then call them in the function sequentially using a counter. Conceptually, I think that is how I would design it.

I think the timed text is a very effective way to add interest to your web page but I would not use it for critical or important information that I wanted every visitor to the site to see. Some people will tune out the ‘moving parts’ of a web site because they look and feel like advertisements so the information in the timed text area shouldn’t be a critical part of the information flow on the page.