Notes on codes, projects and everything
To do node selection for DOM operations, one typically uses CSS selectors as (probably) popularized by jQuery. However, there is another alternative that is as powerful if not better known as XPath. XPath may be able to do a lot more than just selecting node (which I have no time to find out for now) but I will just focus on how to do node selection in this blog post.
This post continued from this post. Finally I have found some time to start developing my pet project using Zend Framework. After getting the controller to work the way I am more familiar (comparing to Kohana which I used at work) with, the next step is to get it to output some data.
After coded enough Javascript few months back, I found that there are a couple of functions that I kept re-using in different projects. Therefore I took some time to refactor them and re-arrange them into a single file. The common code that I keep reusing even today consists of functions that does prototypical inheritance, scope maintenance, some jquery stuff, google maps api stuff and some general ajax application related code.
Maintaining state in Javascript is not too difficult once you catch the idea. However, as I am not a super brilliant programmer, it takes me some time to find a way to maintain state as YUI Event does in jQuery.
After the last post, I found that it may be fun to write a wrapper for YUI in order to make it behave like jQuery. Therefore, the code below is clearly mainly for self-amusement and is not intended to be used in production projects. However, through coding this, I found that although the difference in design, but YUI is obviously capable to do what jQuery offers (if not more). I will not continue working on this so whoever interested may just copy and paste the code to further developing it.
When one start writting Javascript in patterns like the module pattern, then sooner or later he would want to maintain the state when an event handler is called. The reason I am still using YUI to handle my event handling code is because I like how state can be maintained.
I am starting to like programming in Javascript, especially after understanding more about how Javascript handles scopes. Surprisingly this take me like a year to figure out how scope is managed. The result of the findings is that I start doing a lot of experiments and discovered more interesting stuff through them.
I like how Kohana 3 organizes the classes, and I thought the same thing may be applied to my Zend Framework experimental project. Basically what this means is that I can name the controller class according to PEAR naming convention, and deduce the location of the file by just parsing the class name.
After being frustrated of not getting consistent and accurate result via standard DOM methods especially html_element.getAttribute('key');
and html_element.setAttribute('key', 'value');
, I came across some YUI library components that provides abstractions to various DOM methods. Some interesting DOM-related tools covered in this post are YAHOO.util.Element
, YAHOO.util.DOM
and YAHOO.util.Selector
.
Just happened to see this post a few months ago, and the author created another cloud that uses almost the same technique to ‘visualize’ a list of countries. The author uses PHP to generate the cloud originally and I thought I may be able to do in javascript. After some quick coding I managed to produce something similar to the first example, source code after the jump.
One of my recent tasks involving crawling a lot of geo-tagged data from a given service. The most recent one is crawling files containing a point cloud for a given location. So I began by observing the behavior in the browser. After exporting the list of HTTP requests involved in loading the application, I noticed there are a lot of requests fetching resources with a common rXXX
pattern.
While the previous file structure works well, I decided to tune some details before deploying the latest WordPress release. Besides that, I also started a new theme development project after my last theme which was developed more than 2 years ago. Thankfully, everything seems to work so far.
The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.
Writing a usable form and database library has always been a painful experience. So why bother re-inventing the wheel when there are so many to choose from already? I am writing one mostly for learning purpose. After numerous attempts, I finally get my form and database library in shape. It is nowhere complete, but nor it is perfect, but it is currently the implementation that is closest to my original design. I will keep working on it so it can be used in my personal projects in the future.
Semantic Web is not just about putting data on the web, but also making links to allow a person as well as a machine to explore the web of data. Links are made in the web of data connects arbitrary things together as described by RDF as opposed to links in the web of hypertext, where links connects to only web-resources. Linkage of arbitrary things then allow related things to be found while performing search.