Tag Archives: Javascript/jQuery

Javascript: Oh, Take Me Back to the Start

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The title of this post comes from a lyric in “The Scientist” by the band Coldplay. It seemed to best sum up my quest to refresh my perspective on JavaScript by completing a course on Pluralsight called Basics of Programming with JavaScript by Kyle Simpson. I wanted to find out after many years of programming in the language if I had the basics right. The course was very good in both introducing JavaScript but also the concepts of programming itself.

Here is a little breakdown of the concepts that stayed with me following the course (besides calling it JavaScript instead of Javascript after noticing the title and a little Web search. Although, like a number of things to do with the actual language, it’s really not a big concern which one you use).

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2017: the year of Javascript?

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Hi there coders, how have you been? It’s been a busy year on my end, lots of projects both at work and at play. Since 2016 is drawing to a close, I’ve been thinking about what I would like to learn in the new year. Perhaps the better word may be “relearn”.

I think I would like to learn about Javascript again. It is my primary programming language and I have been using it for over a decade, but, I’m interested in what I could learn now that it has indeed been over a decade, and there are so many sources to learn from and avenues to take. How could I better optimize my code? What tricks may I have missed along the way, or better yet, what best practices may better replace some of my current ones?

Javascript has evolved over the years in the Web world, from a client-side programming language to handle things like processing forms, to being the base of Web code libraries and frameworks like jQuery to support more functionality, and now facilitating server-side communication such as with Node.js. My work has been mainly client-side, but I am interested in how Javascript is being used in all aspects of the Web.

Thus I hope in 2017 I will rekindle my friendship with Javascript and get to know it again from a fresh perspective. I’m going to take inspiration from Neil Peart, the amazing drummer for Rush. After 30-odd successful years he relearned the drums and then continued on the path of self-improvement throughout his drumming career. (Did I mention some of my busy time this past year has been spent drumming?) Surely this humble Web dev can try to find some of his grit in 2017? Grit, I like that word. Happy New Year fair coders!

AngularJS: “The Daisy Special!” Popup Takes Action

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Daisy Plates Bootstrap AngularJS site screen capture

Back again fellow coders, to take a look at another framework in the web universe: AngularJS. AngularJS is a Javascript framework used to build web applications. In my previous post we learned about the front-end framework Bootstrap, which helps you pull all the HTML/Javascript/CSS pieces together to get a polished website in a short time. AngularJS has a lot of client-side coding involved, but is more about taking that web site and giving it some pizazz if you will, to make it into a web app that interacts with things like data on a web server. This is a simplistic description of these two frameworks but helps distinguish their core differences. In fact you often may see them used together. When I described Bootstrap I used a Lego analogy, and for AngularJS, I will continue along the “building” path to find a new analogy involving…Doozers!

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Bootstrap 3: Daisy Plates Website Gets A Revamp

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Daisy Plates Bootstrap site screen capture

Hello fair coders, I hope you have been well! Recently I decided it was time to learn about frameworks, and in particular a very popular one called Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS/Javascript front-end framework that is behind many sites including the one that brought it to life in the first place, Twitter. Using a framework like Bootstrap is like getting a snappy new Lego set — one with the basics, but also cool pieces like wheels and hinges, and a set of instructions to build a shiny new world, or in our case, website. However we all know when it comes to Lego, you often take a glimpse at those instructions and then do what you want anyway, and frameworks are cool with that too!

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PHP: Objects and AJAX and Doodles – Oh My!

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Screen capture of artsyCoderDoodles Web App with small canvas
Chapter six in “PHP The Good Parts” (MacIntyre, Peter B. PHP: The Good Parts. USA: O’Reilly, 2010) is about PHP objects. We visited object-oriented programming back in my posts on the ASP.NET/C# “Magic Menu” where I discussed some behind-the-scenes on object-oriented (or “oo”) concepts.

This post will be about what I programmed after reading about PHP objects – a doodle web app which started out as a simple little combination of PHP oo programming and some HTML5 canvas and turned into a wild blend of PHP, HTML5, Javascript, jQuery, CSS, AJAX and XML. The final result could have probably been accomplished with less technologies, but in the end it was fun to try out some “extras” in combination with the PHP and HTML5 and learn about those as well. You could say the code is a bit of “doodle” itself! Or I may be getting carried away with the doodle metaphor – on to the doodling app and it’s doodles (but not oodles) of code!

artsyCoderDoodles Web App

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jQuery: Magic Menu Web App Revisited!

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I recently completed a series of articles on an ASP.NET/C# web app called “Magic Menu”. Please check out the first post in that series here. It should be noted that this web app was built while studying the book “Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010” (MacDonald, Matthew. Beginning ASP.NET in C# 2010. USA: Apress, 2010) and uses similar concepts as a sample in the book, as well as some of its code bits and conventions.

Screen capture of jQuery Magic Menu web app

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ASP.NET/C#: Magic Menu Web App: Part Three

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Welcome to episode three of our series on the “Magic Menu” web app – the C# code!

Please check out part two before we begin if you like.

Default.aspx.cs

We start out by importing a standard set of namespaces, which generally hold tons of standard .NET classes we may want to use within the rest of our code.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Drawing;

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