The second episode of The Ten Spot Intensive deals with a popular programming language, JavaScript, and an up-and-coming framework within that language, jQuery. This episode features guest appearances by Nathan Smith and Matt Vasquez of Fellowship Technologies.

About Nathan Smith:

Adding the following code in any PHP area in Drupal will give you settings values available client-side that you can use when writing JavaScript code.

Pass a key/value associative array to drupal_add_js() and give it type value of 'setting'. Note that I am using an array of arrays with the key of the first array as the name of the module. This is to namespace the settings. This will keep your settings from overriding others and others from overriding yours.

//PHP code in your module or in a PHP snippet anywhere on your site
 
$jquery_settings = array(
  'myModule' => array(
    'mySetting1' => 'myvalue1', 
    'mySetting2' => 'myvalue2' )
);
drupal_add_js($jquery_settings, 'setting');

Often called JavaScript links, these are another way of a web page to link to another.

Plug-in scripting is a general term to describe any programming that is contained in a embedded page object. The best example of object scripting is 'Lingo', a language to extend the abilities of Macromedia's Shockwave animations. Many of these proprietary plug-in specific languages exist, all with varying capabilities. Some of these languages, including Lingo, can interface with JavaScript.

Typical functions for multi-media plug-ins include:

• Enable buttons to change pages in multi-media presentations

Client-side scripting describes programming that is added into a web page to interact with page and browser objects. It differs from server-side scripting because it is executed on each user's computer instead of on the originating web server. JavaScript is the most common scripting language; VBScript is also used but only works on Windows browsers. Client-side scripting is becoming a sophisticated arena paving the way for advanced functionality.

JavaScript is the common name of W3C-approved ECMA Script. It is the client-side scripting language of all modern web browsers. It provides a common Document Object Model for programmatically identifying each tag used on a web page and a simple yet powerful syntax for manipulating a web page after it has loaded.

Our Practices:

We use JavaScript for client-side scripting. Common functionality is form validation, navigation rollovers, and Ajax enhancements.

External Links

W3C DOM Level 1

I'll be the first to say I love Javascript. I have two big Javascript books to my right to prove it. It's one of the greatest things about the web two-point-oh! movement (yes, I hate that term). And I love milk. But I will also be the first to say I hate how some people misuse Javascript.

There's been a lot of talk going around lately about CSS bar graphs. Just go to delicious and type in "css graphs" and you'll find hundreds of links to Apples to Oranges post "CSS for Bar Graphs." There's even a rails plugin based on that post.

Well a while back Matt introduced me to this nifty little javascript library called moo.fx built on top of the prototype and mootools framework. So after playing with moo.fx for a while I began to delve into the mootools framework itself which is pretty flexible, lightweight, and very easy to use.

Came across this link, it's ridiculously awesome. If you think you have enough web dev reading you're wrong!! Broken out into categories, it features hundreds of websites for CSS, JavaScript, HTML, standard specs, tutorials, references and a lot more.

Keep it handy for when you're bored, pretty much everything there is a great read.

Web Developer's Handbook