Playing On The Google Playground

I have decided to play around with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google AppEngine.  Both look very interesting , very promising, and very fun.  I don’t know very much about them, so this should be an interesting experience and I am sure to learn a ton of new technologies along the way.

My first app is just going to be a Task list.  There are a plethora of Task Lists out there, but I think it will be fun and a good place to start.  I’ve already created my site, The Super List, so feel free to watch the progress (if any)!

Magic Poi

I just discovered the Apache POI Project.  I needed to export data from a JTable into an Excel spreadsheet and I didn’t want the hassle of exporting as csv and getting warnings from Excel, so a little search gave me POI, and it is simple and easy to use.

Download it and read the documentation that comes with the download (it seems to be a little more updated than the website).  Plenty of examples.

jQuery Is My New Best Friend

I have been struggling for weeks upon weeks upon mind bending, agonizing weeks to solve what I would think to be a simple javascript problem. I needed a popup box to come up just left and center of another element. Well I searched through results provided by Google and Yahoo! and found a number of solutions that didn’t work for my particular situation. However, those examples provided a stepping stone for me to figure out how to position it where I wanted. The next problem was re-positioning the popup if it went beyond the top or bottom edge of the window viewport. This is where jQuery came to the rescue. If I had discovered this earlier, a lot of headache would have been prevented and I would have more hair.

jQuery has this: $(“#popup”).offset(), which returns the elements absolute top and left positions no matter where they are in the page and no matter how many elements they are nested in.

Thanks to smart people.

JavaScript Tool: Nifty Corners Cube(tm)

The first JavaScript tool I want to mention is Nifty Corners Cube by Alessandro Fulciniti.  This is a great little utility for rounding the corners on your html elements without using time consuming images and it is very simple to use.

Sidetracked By FLEX

I’m still going to do research/comparison on JavaScript libraries, but I am sidetracked by the amazing possibilities offered by Adobe(tm) FLEX. The UI is beautiful, the cross-browser/platform advantages speak for themselves, and the simplicity of writing a FLEX application sells me on it.

This just brings me to the same question that seems to haunt me: “With so many amazing technologies, how is a boy to choose?”

Many JavaScript Libraries

So I found I new JavaScript library. Maybe you’ve heard of it. EXT JS. I have been using PrototypeJs and the Script.aculo.us library for a little while, but just now came across this new library. I have only briefly looked at EXT JS, namely their desktop,which , though slow and a little bug prone, looks very good. The things we can do with the web are limitless and the more we stretch ourselves by attempting new things the better.

So I think everyone knows that there is a plethora of tools at the disposale of the web developer. How then do we decide which are the right tools for us? I think I will explore the different tools I have come across, write about them, and let whomever decides to read comment. So stay tuned.