Thu Jun 30
Right, bear with me, this is going to take some time. As the highlight, some would say pinnacle, of my discussions about web technology I am going to talk about server-side scripting. For several reasons: firstly is is generally not much talked about when discussing web design (especially standards-based design and accessibility), secondly it’s much more easy to get to grips with that people assume, thirdly I believe that in server-side scripting lies much of the potential power of web applications.
The fact that server-side scripting, whether classic ASP using VBScript or PHP, is what I do all day may also have something to do with it.
As I’ve hinted through the other articles about this subject, server-side scripting - because it happens on the server, surprise, surprise - can be used to generate each of the three “output” technologies; HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And so that’s what I’d like to demonstrate, through the use of various functions I’ve written which utilise the power of server-side scripting to powerfully create, modify and interact with client-side technologies.
First in the list: Aire - automatic image replacement engine. This function uses PHP to create image(s) based on various parameters requested by the script, and creates the HTML and CSS required to show those images. Take a look at the article and the demo for more details.
Second on the list: some PHP/JavaScript functions I’ve written to simplify the use of AJAX-style DOM scripting techniques. That sounds incredibly complex, and I’m yet to come up with a name for it, but it will very adequately show another way to use the power of server-side scripting. Hopefully that will be available in the next day or so, watch this space…
Wed Jun 29
Every now and then something comes along that stuns me into silent, awestruck joy. It happened the day I got my first drum kit, several times with my children, and most recently when Katharine agreed to become my wife. Happy days.
Well, the discovery today isn’t as good as all that, but for a piece of software it’s pretty darned impressive. The chaps at Google have gone and done it again, creating this masterpiece of software, that links to the Google Maps system to provide 3D views of the entire world. At the moment the images of anywhere outside North America are of quite low quality, and the 3D buildings feature only works for selected cities, but I’m sure they’ll have that sorted soon.
So, download and have a play. You’ll be impressed. A couple of warnings first - the download is 10Mb, and if you don’t have a reasonably new computer or a broadband internet connection you’ll be struggling to run it.
Mon Jun 27
While browsing through my list of feeds I read this article by John Oxton at Joshuaink which laments how the microformats site is, well, too technical. As I discovered a few years ago when first looking into XML, the basic idea is very simple but some people tend to overcomplicate it.
As John says, getting to the heart of the matter is the important bit. That’s when technology starts to make sense, where complex theory is replaced with simple ideas, where it starts to become second-nature. Maybe I’m just a simple kinda-guy, but if great people like John have the same problems then perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.
Sat Jun 25
Spending any time in a garage makes one realise how unmasculine being a computer nerd is. First against the wall come the revolution, that’s me. Oh well.
Fri Jun 24
To be honest I’m only learning about JavaScript - at least the New Way of JavaScript - at the moment myself, so I am far from a well-qualified person to speak about it in depth. However, suffice to say that modern JavaScript scripting is really, really cool.
And not just cool, but the web world as a whole seems to have grown up, and have realised that the DOM really is a standard, and that JavaScript can be used while still maintaining web standards adherence. Which is a good thing.
In fact I would go as far to say that it’s only because of the recent (last few years) recognition of web standards that modern JavaScript has been able to happen at all. After all, people must have thought “If we’re getting rid of the extraneous code in pages, and abstracting out presentational information from content then surely we can do that with interactive scripting as well?” But these are web-heads we’re talking about, so they probably thought “Isn’t it time to go to the pub yet?”.
I won’t bore you with waffling on about the possibilities modern JavaScript affords us, you’ve all seen GMail and Google Maps and other shining lights of this technology. However one interesting thing I saw today got me thinking. Several people have mentioned the possibility of JavaScript/DOM being the new Flash. I’m unsure about that, but it does say reams about how people are thinking about the potential capabilities of modern scripting.
So, if you want to see all this in action, you could do worse than to look at this nifty application which interrogates information from Delicious. Fantastic use of JavaScript from Johnvey.
And, of course, as I’ve said about HTML and CSS so far, as JavaScript is executed on the client-side it can be generated by anything you want on the server-side - PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Perl, Python etc etc. And that, dear friends, is where the real power of this comes in, and when I must move onto - perhaps - the most juicy part of this tasty technology quintuplet, server-side scripting. Watch this space…
del.cio.us,
Digg,
Yahoo!,
Google
Nick Harper, 10th May 2007 (4)
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Whitby from the Hill
