I mention Oracle in this post so as a reminder: my views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.…
Comments closedCategory: Web Apps
Since my last post where I presented a number of ideas on a declarative domain specific language for implementing web applications, I learned about the…
Comments closedIn a couple of recent posts I have argued that a higher level language is needed to
provide a significant boost to programmer productivity in the area of web applications. This is a topic I have been thinking about for many years. I’ve worked out some aspects of what I think the language should be. A little over a year ago I even started implementing a parser for the language in ANTLR. I worked on it for a few weeks before moving on to other higher priority projects. Higher priority simply means something more interesting caught my eye. It’s finally dawning on me that I’m not going to get a big enough block of free time to work on this any time soon. I guess I prioritize the smaller projects that have a better chance of getting finished.
Instead of mothballing the project completely I’m going to share some ideas from it. This his may be of interest to others and who knows, I may get back to it from time to time.
1 CommentWhen you read about REST these days it is usually in the context of APIs. You’ll even find REST being discussed in Web Service and…
1 CommentTools, languages or frameworks — which will have the biggest impact on developer productivity? I previously said that I thought languages could do better than…
Comments closedMy first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I got it just before going to college. I had been interested in computers since junior high…
Comments closedI have read Life above the Service Tier a few times now. Its a very good paper, one that really changes your perspective, but I wish it was better. If you work on web applications and you haven’t read this paper I recommend that you go read it now — but do come back.
I agree with the overall reasoning and the conclusion.
So one obvious way to correct the thin client architecture is to implement a true MVC framework on the client side… That means that all “Presentation Flows” must occur within the currently Âloaded web page… So one workable model is the Single Page Application (SPA).
First let me get some minor complaints out of the way.
5 CommentsThe HTML button element has given me trouble in the past. My conclusion was to not use the button element except to progressively enhance the look of buttons. This means the button would initially be an input of type button and JavaScript, if enabled, would change it to a button element.
Well at work I’m working on an app that requires JavaScript and all form submissions are done with JavaScript already so I thought it would be safe to switch over to <button>. The server never uses the button names or values (all needed information is in other inputs – hidden or otherwise) so the IE bugs should not be an issue.
This time the problems I found were exposed with Firefox but the real problem was in the web app code even if the browser behavior was surprising.
2 Comments[This originally appeared on my dev2dev blog 29-Jan-2008]
Here is the proper way to warn users so they don’t loose changes by accidentally navigating away from a form.
[This originally appeared on my dev2dev blog 20-Nov-2007]
One of the often cited benefits of semantic markup is improved accessibility. It is not a guarantee that if you use semantic markup that your page will be accessible but it helps and when you do find accessibility problems they are easier to fix.
[This originally appeared on my dev2dev blog 16-Nov-2007]
Here are instructions for using JSLint from Ant to check your JavaScript for common potential problems.
[This originally appeared on my dev2dev blog 16-Nov-2007]
Making web applications today means incorporating some amount of ajax and that means using JavaScript. Here are some pointers for bringing good engineering practices to JavaScript.