Programming with Poise

Gmail and Microsoft Outlook

I can’t get enough of Gmail.  It rules.

The conversation-based (as opposed to singular message-based) interface approach is a quite simple, yet ingenious tweak that really gives the web app a nice flow.  And, of course, it’s Google technology, so with Gmail, everything is search-able, and you never have to delete anything.  Also, the spam filter has never failed me once.

What could be better than my Gmail address having an interface of this caliber?  Why, having ALL of my email addresses use a similar interface.  And that’s just what Gmail lets you do.  You can use your standard Gmail account as a [POP or IMAP] client for up to five (count ‘em, FIVE) additional addresses.

Now, I’ve been using Gmail like this for about six months, and I have to say I’ve been completely satisfied in every way.  Except one.  Every once in a while, I’ll get someone ask me why my name, on mail I’ve sent, appears “On Behalf of Chris Tonkinson.”

Gmail acts as does any other POP or IMAP client - so why should my outgoing mail be thus disorganized and unappealing? It turns out that when you send mail from a different address through your Gmail interface, Google automatically adds your Gmail account to the “sender” field to avoid it looking like spam.  And, in some versions of Microsoft Outlook, this can lead to the interface declaring that you are sending mail on your own behalf.

Perhaps you view this as proper behavior.  Perhaps not.  Either way, it seems annoying that anyone using Outlook should be encumbered by this extra verbiage.

December 01 2008 | Applications and Usability and Web | No Comments »

Webstraction

My new foray into web development has been bolstered substantially by using jQuery for any client-side scripting needs.  However, I’ve also been using a new server-side tool in my belt.  I call it Webstraction… it’s a web development not-framework I’ve recently built.

I like the idea of web development abstractions.  That’s what CakePHP, symfony, and Rails all are, at a very high level.  They are systems which take care of lower-level grunt work for you, and free up your time to focus on site/application design, rather than the nitty gritty technical details of the actual programming itself.  All basically serve to answer the same cry: I don’t want to write the same code more than once.  For example, header logic that checks to see if the user is logged in, footer markup that displays links at the bottom of the page, left hand navigation, etc.  You place the code for these in certain places, and then you include them where you need them.

Taking it a step further, many of these tools can actually automatically handle including the code for you - provided you put it in the right places, name it the right name, use it in the right fashion, and only need it in certain circumstances.  Many of these frameworks will actually write code for you, if you take the time to learn their system.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with learning one of these systems, and then leveraging it to quickly churn out product.  However, I take issue with them for a single reason.  Say I commit hours, weeks, whatever, to learning Rails.  To really learning Rails, and being beyond proficient with it.  And then I spend the time to use it for several sites.  What happens to the first site where I want to step outside of the Rails paradigm?  Do something that it doesn’t support?  Do something that goes against it’s main function?

It breaks, or you break. Either you have to go then into the Rails core code, and start hacking it up (making upgrading to newer versions highly time-consuming, if not impossible in some cases), or you have to break down, and give up your dream (or find a compromise to make it happen).  All of these solutions are, to me, a bit unsavory.

What would really be nice, is a system that let you do what you do, but didn’t tell you how to go about it.  Offered you a set of tools that made you more productive, but didn’t get in your way when you wanted to go and do something non-standard.  That’s where Webstraction comes into play.  Webstraction provides standard methodologies for building web pages and accessing common code.  It is an abstraction in that, many times, the logical flow of page creation depends merely upon the existence or absence of a given file or directory.  It provides a really smooth interface for having the system automatically grab all necessary php, css, and javascript files for you.  Webstraction also has special handlers for Ajax requests.  And, most currently, I’m in the process of redeveloping it to support plug-ins (which seem, on today’s web, to be an expectation (Just look at the communities around Firefox, jQuery, and Wordpress, for instance).

I’ve submitted the project to SourceForge with a GNU/GPL license, and a recent version is available for download there, however I’ve not yet completed the documentation site, nor have I migrated the Subversion repository.  More updates to follow.

October 29 2008 | Development and Web | No Comments »

jQuery and you. And me.

I’ve had a bit of a writers block lately.  I thought it was due to the fact that I’d been too busy developing to think up things to write.  And then I made a realization - the entire concept of a blog on computer science is to share my experiences; If I’m busy solving problems and writing code, then, necessarily, I have blog fodder.  One of those moments where you rediscover something you already knew, in an entirely new light.

I’ve been getting pretty heavily into web development lately.  Wrote my own web development abstraction system (I cringe to call it a “framework” because frameworks, by definition, are restrictive, and my goal here was to do as much heavy lifting for the web developer as I could, without stepping on their toes at any point), and more recently, wrote a jQuery plugin for myself called Superedit.  I’ve really been loving jQuery.  Really loving it.  I would recommend it very highly if you’re looking to add any javascript to your site; jQuery makes web development a real pleasure.

As all of my project start, I got sidetracked.  While writing a site for the Honors Program here at my school, I decided that I’d like to make all “edit” functionality on the site happen via an edit-in-place system.

Take a user account page for example.  Say you want to change your contact email address.  The form might look like so:

And when you click on the span, I use JavaScript to turn it into an input like so:

You edit the content:

And then, on JavaScript’s blur() or change() events, the content is saved via callback, and the input is turned back into a span:

Now, personally, I think this is one of the greatest toys Ajax has given us so far.  The ability to edit (and validate) form input without having to reload entire pages for a single element to change.  Of course, the first [working] iteration of this system spanned two disjoint JavaScript files, a php header, a php function file, and then more configuration in the markup itself.  Now I’ve got it down into two plain jQuery methods.  To initialize the element for display:

$( 'selector' ).superbox( 'initial value', callback, { options } );

And to initialize the element for editing:

$( 'selector' ).superinput( 'initial value', callback, { options } );

And the plugin handles the rest.  The only tricky part has been getting the callback to behave itself, so I’m working on getting that stable.  jQuery plugin generation is actually a pretty pleasant process.  A good primer can be found directly from jQuery’s documentation, and once you’ve gone through that, an excellent practical demonstration can be found here.

I’ll probably be posting again soon on Superedit when I get it stable and formally add it to the jQuery Plugin list.  If you want to add hover event handlers, use collapsible containers, Ajax, browser-dependent scripting, or, like me, you want to extend the already sprawling library and bend your XHTML to your will, javascript has never been easier.

… I think I should get paid for advertising.

October 28 2008 | Development and Libraries and Web | No Comments »