I was exploring the way to integrate GoogleMap on Flex with Rails as backend. My main focus was to detect the user events happening on Google Map using Flex, and then display the data sent by Rails to Flex. So, lets see what i did.

If you want to quickly know see the demo of my work, please click http://gmap-flex-rails.heroku.com/
(more…)

Tags: Adobe Air, Flex, RIA, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, XML
Posted in Software | 3 Comments »

I created a simple app with Flex 4 as front end and Rails 2.3.5 as back end. Well these days I started refreshing my knowledge on Flex, so here is my attempt on showing a flex chart with some events associated with it in order to render dynamic data delivered by Rails. Well as for the Rails App i am not going to explain the code much deeper since it’s a simple scaffold.

   script/generate scaffold Report month:string profit:float expenses:float amount:float

Before you read further, you can check demo of the app I developed at http://barchartapp.heroku.com/
(more…)

Tags: Add new tag, Adobe, Flex, RIA, Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0, XML
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If you want to know how to send and receive data from Flex and Rails using XML or JSON or AMF data types, then please read further.

Firstly, to get a bite at of what i am talking about, please check the demo.

Now let see this from coding perspective.

Tags: ActionScript, Adobe Air, AMF, Flex, json, RIA, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, XML
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Lets say you have a new user registration page where you validate user entered loginid against the database using Ajax and immediately display available or not.

for this you might do like..

1. Detect onChange event of the text field
2. read input and call Ajax
3. process ajax output and display availability in the adjacent div or span tag using innerHTML.

Sometimes it may take a while for ajax to complete the process of calling the remote database and read back responseXML, now if you want to show a loading or processing screen for that moment ?, just use this tip.

While onChange event of the text field occurs…

function loginID_OnChange(){

  //set the div tag to show loading message
   document.getElementById(“opmsg”).innerHTML = ”    checking availability…”;
   // call the ajax for checking the loginid
   var result = myAjaxFunction(loginidvalue);
   // show the new value in the div tag
   document.getElementById(“opmsg”).innerHTML = result;
}

You can also find some animated activity gif from this site.

Tags: Ajax, Javascript, RIA, Web 2.0
Posted in Software | 3 Comments »

If your job role involves activities like “web page scripting, AJAX, interactive user interface development, HTML content rendering, rich content website development and whatever that you do to get the webpage up and showing”, then you might find this blog entry handy while setting up your PC for web application/UI developments.
This blog entry is not about web layout or image design & development.

1. Test with Firefox
   

   No matter what, this is a must tool for you. While I personally I surfing with IE, Firefox stays ahead of many browsers when its comes to testing your web page. Lots of plugins developed around this make Firefox useful everyday. Continue reading this blog, you will see yourself why it is so.

2. Add Web Developer
   

   Imagine a tool that can help you view/edit/list css of a webpage and that too dynamically ?. Imagine a tool that can help you to trace & inspect attributes of a html object just by placing the mouse over it ?. Imagine a tool that can show your webpage on various screen resolution.. Yes its all there in Web Developer. Want to see exactly it looks like, click this
   link which shows the screenshot of a webpage in firefox with web developer activated.

3. Add Venkman / SeaMonkey
   

   At one point, you might require a tool where you need to debug your javascript line by line and/or method by method. Add watch to a variable, simulate a script and so on. Yes this kind of debugging tool is available for javascript and the best one that works quite well with Firefox2.0 is Venkman.

4. Add Microsoft Script Editor – Javascript Debugger for MS IE
   

   Getting it working is little difficult, but atleast the tutorial at http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/01/howto_debug_jav.html helps us to do so. This helps if you want to fix bugs that works in Firefox but not in IE.

5. Add FireBug
   

   This is as powerful as Web developer. The unique features of this is the ability to sniff the messages that was sent using XMLHttprequest/AJAX. This helps you to see what exactly your request/response carries. Particulary useful for tracing JSON datas sent while using AJAX

6. Add Scriptaculous
   

   If you do lots of javascripting for your page (and or AJAX), then it is advisable to use Scriptaculous – Prototype capability. Dont waste your time by writing codes that do the DHTML magics. Everything that your rich web UI expects to have is defined in it. Includes funtionality like Array manipulations, JSON, Drag & drop and so on. Dont reinvent the wheel ?

7. Use a prebuilt Javascript library for AJAX operations
   

   Dont write your code unless you want to make less than 2 ajax calls for your application. Javascript libraries like Dojo, DWR, Ajax tags works very will leading web apploication frameworks. For instance DWR with Spring makes AJAXing extremely easy.

8. Use Xeno Link sleuth
   

   Dont publish your website without checking for the broken links. Even if you happen to remove a webapge from your directory, do provide a re-redirect option for that page. This will help your customer stay tuned to new changes in your site. Xenu link sleuth does a great job on finding and listing broken links.

9. Use Selenium
   

   The best testing breeed that can test and tell things like Browser compatibility checking and System functionality testing. A nice tool for writing test cases on javascript as well.

10. Add HTML Validator
    

    A tool that will help to confirm your html code to W3C XHTML specifications. It is important to get your web page to xhtml complaint as you will never know what user-agent will be? It can be a mobile or pda or webtv and so on. XHTML atleast helps to keep the content layout stable.

These are just top 10 tips and if you found some more tools useful at everyday of your web development, please kindly add that as a comment.

Filed under: General, Javascript

Tags: RIA, UI, UX, Web 2.0
Posted in Software | 2 Comments »

The idea is to validate the username/password as soon as the user enters the data into the form input field of the browser.

The code snippets below will show how to do this using the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object. The XHR (or so called AJAX) helps to do this without making the webpage reload after hitting the server.

Well, you can use famous JavaScript libraries like Prototype, dwr or Dojo to do this. Using them will also reduce the code size. But… if you are interested in knowing how this is really done using XHR directly, then read on…
more

Tags: Ajax, Javascript, RIA, Web 2.0
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Google Web Toolkit Solutions: Cool & Useful Stuff
by David Geary

Publisher: Prentice Hall
Pub Date: January 18, 2007
Pages: 112

I got a chance to review this new eBook Google Web toolkit solutions by David Grey via Javaranch book review team.

Off the topic: You would need either the free Adobe Reader or Digital Editions to read this eBook.

While personally I like the Author’s another book on JSF, this eBook is not very much interesting to read.
This eBook neither serves the purpose of the programmers notebook nor as a reference material.

It simply goes through the code of the building Yahoo! trip application and Address book with GWT, something that you see in the last chapters of the Wrox published books – the sample application.

Out of 122 pages, most of the pages were taken over by re-printing the complete Java code. (Example Section 3: Drag and Drop).

Articles that covers integrating GWT with Spring/Hibernate/Maven is already available for free in Internet, so this eBook should have taken some other advanced topics.

Apart from the above comments, this eBook gives a good overview on using GWT with RPC, Java script tools, Hibernate and so on.

I particularly liked the Section 1 of this book that describes about GWT RPC.

Tags: GWT, Java, Javascript, RIA, Web 2.0
Posted in Review, Software | No Comments »

The authors have taken good efforts to neatly introduce, analyses and compare various javascript tools specifically meant for AJAX.
The flow of the book is well managed and its very reader friendly.
This book is definitely a one stop reference for knowing what development tools, editors, libraries available for supporting AJAX in Java web applications.
Comes with 50MB examples source code. The source code has been configured to easily deploy and test using ANT.
This book mostly addresses the freely available AJAX tools.
Few drawbacks i found:
A lot of pages have been spent on describing and comparing between java frameworks, the authors could have avoided it since this book about using AJAX in java framework.
The code listings in the chapters (like html, javascript, jsp) were not well formatted, so it very difficult to read.
The authors gives more preference to JSF framework which is again not the context of the book.
Thats it.

Since the book is published recently(July06), this book covers many latest AJAX and JAVA Framework products, so its saves your time on finding a right tool
for your ajax based websites.
I dont want to write again the table of contents of this book but want to mention that you will sure learn all the bit and pieces that you need have for setting up a AJAX based java web applications.

Tags: Ajax, Java, Javascript, RIA, Spring, Web 2.0
Posted in Review | 1 Comment »