Our Blog

Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook – Available Now

2 November 2009 09:49, Posted by Colin

The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon is now available. As Jorge says in his introductory post:

The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is for developers who want a book of useful techniques, with explanations, that they can refer to and adapt to their purposes.

I was a Technical Reviewer for this book, and it contains not just simple recipes to get you started, but complex ones to allow you to bend Ext JS to your will. If you buy Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook eBook along with the eBook edition of the book I co-authored, Learning Ext JS, you can get a 50% discount using the promo code jsco34ler on the Packt website. Congratulations Jorge!

Objective-J & Cappuccino

7 September 2008 12:32, Posted by simon

This may be an unusual first post in my Objective-C and Cocoa categories however it is quite relevant as the guys behind 280 Slides have released a new open source extension to the Javascript language known as Objective-J and a new Javascript framework based on Cocoa named Cappuccino.

Other than having a very nice logo designed by the guys at Sofa my first impressions are they have implemented Objective-C in javascript. To me this seems an unusual choice as I can’t image there are that many developers (within the web development industry) who are that familiar with Objective-C. Maybe I am wrong, certainly with the current gold rush to develop for the iPhone this will increase. I must admit I have been toying with Objective-C recently and once I got the hang of the syntax am really starting to enjoy it. So maybe there is method to their madness? Read more…

Live Validation – Custom Validator

6 September 2007 21:51, Posted by Jon

Following my article earlier today on Live Validation, I have had a response from Alec regarding how to create a custom validator to use with his Live Validation framework.

Having asked if a custom Validator could be passed in the .Now() function Alec had the following to say:

In regards to passing a custom validation method into the .now method, it will not \’91create\’92 the validation method as such, but will accept one you have made, as long as your custom validation method takes a value as the first argument, and throws a Validate.Error exception when it fails (in order to pass on the failure message made easier by using Validate.fail), and true if it passes. For example:

Validate.Example = function(value, paramsObj)\{
// the following sets up default options and overides them with those passed in
var params = Object.extend(\{
failureMessage: “Default failre message goes in here!“
\}, paramsObj || \{\});
// here you would check the value you wish to validate (the one passed in), against some expected value
// if it fails then use the Validate.fail method will throw an exception containing the failure message
if(value != ‘My expected value‘) Validate.fail(params.failureMessage);
// if the script reaches this far then no exception has been thrown, so the validation passed
return true;
\}

Alec clarified: “…if you take a look at some of the included validation methods they contain calls to some of the other ones internally, as they will throw exceptions and halt proceedings if they fail, so act in much the same way as the simple one we have above. Validate.Email is a simple example of this and can be easily adapted to make a reusable postcode format validation for instance.”

Following Alec’s example above, you can easily then use the validator using the following:

Validate.now(Validate.Example(), value_to_validate, \{options\})

Using a custom validator opens up many possibilities such as making an AJAX call to the server to check the uniqueness of a username or password.

For more information:

Live Validation

Documentation for Validate.now()

Live Validation – Cross Platform, Rails style validation on the client.

6 September 2007 19:00, Posted by Jon

I came across a great new validation library the other day which I wanted to share with you all. Live Validation by Alec Hill is a cross-platform client-side JavaScript validation framework which provides real-time feedback to the user as they type.

val2

val1

LiveValidation in action

Using ASP.Net / AJAX slide extender to create a color selector

26 April 2007 18:29, Posted by Jon

Using the MS AJAX ASP.Net Extensions and the Ajax Control Toolkit (available through codeplex) You can easily make a colour selector using the Ajax Control Toolkits Slider Extender control.

The Slider Extender included in the Ajax control toolkit renders on the screen as a control that allows the user to click and drag to adjust a numerical value. Out of the box the slider extender is given an ASP:TextBox as it’s Target Control ID, the slider extender automatically hides these textboxes. We can use three slider controls to create a Red, Green and Blue sliders to set a colour. When working in RGB we can set a value of 0 to 255 for each of Red, Green or Blue. So the first thing we need is the three sliders on our HTML page.

ASP.Net MVC Diagram

ASP.Net AJAX Slide Extender Color Selector

Excellent WYSIWYG HTML editor (all platforms)

20 April 2007 18:29, Posted by Jon

I have been trying out several HTML editors for ASP.Net and thought I would share this excellent find that works with several platforms, including ASP.Net, ASP, PHP, Java etc. Up until now I was using FreeTextBox, however this was giving me grief in Firefox so decided that I needed to find a new solution.

FCKeditor is an excellent HTML WYSIWYG editor for ASP.Net as an ASP.Net control is available to use with the Javascript source files to allow you to interact (Get / Set text) etc programmatic ally as you can do with FreeTextBox. In addition to this, FCKEditor allows you to upload images and other files making adding images a breeze and also includes a spell-checker.