Shay’s Blog

The guys at firebug released 1.0.1. Here are the release notes:
1. Support escaping the % sign in console.log() calls using %%
2. Support “Find Next” in the CSS tab
3. Fixed problem causing inconsistent breakpoint triggering
4. Deleting a disabled CSS property will work properly
5. Fixed bug that prevented editing of DOM properties with numeric values
6. Inserted warning about incompatibility with Sothink SWF Catcher extension
7. Fixed incompatibility with HTML Validator extension

The incompatibility with HTML Validator fix is much welcomed.

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I did some interesting AJAX work last week.  I changed one of the pages in my application that displays dynamically created images to use AJAX.  AJAX allowed the page not to be redrawn as the user selects the different images.  The AJAX part was fairly trivial once I ascertained what was the server-side was doing.  The AJAX changes required some refactoring on the server side which was to be expected.  The browser would display the missing image symbol since the image had to be generated and then downloaded.  I found a way to keep that from happening.  What I did was load the image into a variable, and then attach a function to the onLoad event of that image.  The function swaps out the image in memory with the one on the page.  It is pretty cool if I do say so myself.  The onLoad function also does stuff like hides the progress indicator and enables the controls which were turned off when the AJAX call was made.  The code looks something like this:

var myImage = new Image();
myImage.onload = function{
var previewImage = document.getElementById(”previewImage”);
previewImage.src = myImage.src;
}

I used the ContentLoader library which comes with Ajax in Action for the plumbing.  The server sent JSON back to the browser.  This was my first time using JSON which turned to be pretty easy to understand and use.  I was considering using the DOJO toolkit, but I did not want to the number of javascript libraries that had to be loaded by the browser.

Firebug has released its non-beta 1.0 release. I wrote about the beta release of 1.0 here. It is nice to see this great web development tool get some more features. It works directly in firefox or with ie through using an external j/s file. Thanks for the firebug development team.

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One of my favorite firefox extensions has been updated. Update and enjoy. I use the webdeveloper and firebug almost daily for my web development work.

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I have been reading two very good books.  They are both along similar topics.  I have been reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web.  I am enjoying both of them quite a bit.  The Head First is a series from O’Reily that uses an interesting writing style.  The writing style utilizes narratives, illustrations, and lots of exercises to present the topics.   I really enjoy this approach.  I am going to read the Head First Patterns next.  The Zen of CSS is a companion book to the great CSS Zen Garden site.  It takes several different example sites and breaks their elements of style.  I highly recommend both of these books.

I finished an AJAX class today at work.  A lot of it was basic that I already knew, it was nice to see the toolkits and javascript techniques.  The class was scheduled to run for four days, but we finished a day earlier.  I had suggested that we cover in detail the Google Web Kit (GWT) and the dojo toolkit, but the class consensus came to covering the Spring Framework which was fine with me.
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There is a new version of firebug out. If you are not familiar with firebug, it is an essential firefox extension if you are a web developer Firebug gives you some very good javascript development tools. The new version gives you css tools and access to the dom. Download and enjoy.  There is also a cross-browser javascript download that you add to any webpage.
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I went through the article. The Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) is nice. It supports dojo, rico, and zimbra. The code snippets are a nice feature. I built the tree view example which uses dojo in the example. I am going to try it ATF more.

The installation was a bit tedious. I installed using these steps, but ensure you have the eclipse and web project toolkit (WTP) plug-in installed. If you do not you can download it here.

• Download and extract XULRunner into its own directory.
• Open dos window
• Change to the directory you put XULRunner in
• Run xulrunner –register-global
• Run xulrunner –register-user
• Download and extract Tomcat 5.5 into its own directory
• Download Sysdeo 3.2 beta 3 plug-in
• Extract it to the your eclipse plug-in directory
• Start eclipse
• Then open window, preferences, tomcat
• Select tomcat 5.5
• Put the tomcat directory in the tomcat home field
• Hit apply and okay
• Download ATF
• In eclipse Select Help, Software Updates, Find and Install…
• Select Search for new features to install
• Select Next
• Select New Archived Site
• Select the directory that you downloaded ATF into
• Select Finish
• Ensure all ATF features are selected
• Follow the remaining prompts to install ATF
• Stop eclipse
• Then follow the final steps here
• Start eclipse using the –clean option

Congrats you are now good to go using ATF.