Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

Out of the numerous JavaScript libraries which are available, jQuery is my favourite. There are couple of reasons for this and now I have two more reasons added to that list. 

First jQuery is going to be supported by Microsoft and is going to be shipped with Visual Studio, which is great news for people who are addicted to intellisense (like Yuvi ). 

Second Nokia is going to support it and jQuery will be used to develop applications on the new WebKit-based Web Run-Time which will be distributed with Nokia phones.

I think this is great news for jQuery and it is time for me to start hacking it again.

Tags: jQuery, Microsoft, Nokia

I found lot of useful links related to jQuery while researching for my presentation on jQuery. I thought of sharing them here so that it will be useful for others who are looking to get their feet wet with jQuery.

I am planning to constantly updated this post, so if you have any other links which might be useful do leave a comment and I will add them.

Homepage

• Official homepage - http://jquery.com/
• Official Plugin Repository - http://jquery.com/plugins/

References

• Official Documentation - http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page
• Visual API Reference - http://visualjquery.com/
• jQuery API Browser - http://remysharp.com/jquery-api/

Tutorial/Articles

• Simplify Ajax development with jQuery - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-ajaxjquery.html
• Easy Ajax with jQuery - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ajax-jquery
• jQuery: Easy JavaScript for Designers - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/jquery-javascipt-designers
• jQuery: Write less, do more- http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/jquery-write-less-do-more/
• Creating a jQuery Plugin - http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring

jQuery related slides

• A Short Introduction To jQuery - The slide which I prepared for my jQuery Presentation.
• jQuery in 15 minutes
• Extending jQuery
• JavaScript the Smart Way - Getting Started with jQuery
• Beginning Jquery In Drupal Theming
• jQuery - write less, do more javascript toolkit

Some useful Plugins

• LinkedSelect
• Auto-populating Select Boxes
• jQuery Validation Plugin
• jQuery UI Datepicker
• ScrollShow

jQuery Related Books

• jQuery in Action
• jQuery Reference Guide
• Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Tags: Drupal, Javascript, jQuery

I attended WebCamp today as planned. It was good and there were talks about web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails, Django, Flex etc. Unfortunately I was not able to give my talk about jQuery as planned due to some issues with the timings. I was pretty disappointed at first; since it took me considerable amount of time to prepare for the presentation and added to that I drove for more than two hours to attend the event. Anyway that’s life isn’t? You will never know what life has for you the next second. If everything goes as planned, then life would be as dull as a recorded circket match. It is uncertainty which gives life to life (wow! I can make a quote too ).

Anyways to be positive I learned a lot of new things about jQuery when I did my research to prepare for the presentation, even though I have been using it for the past couple of months. Hope you guys also find my slides about jQuery useful.

| View | Upload your own

I have uploaded the slide to slideshare and you can download it from there. I have also collected lot of links about jQuery during my research and I will post them soon. Update: You can find these links here.

There were some great presentations and I particularly liked the talk on Django by KG (Oops! I forgot to find out whether he has a blog). I also learned lot of good things about Ruby on Rails. More reasons for me to get my hands dirty with Ruby on Rails.

Special thanks to Prabhu and other organizers for a wonderful event.

Tags: jQuery, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, WebCamp, WebCampChennai

Some time back I asked you guys to recommend me a FTP program with the Keep remote directory up to date feature of WinSCP. Ramesh asked me write my own, but I couldn’t find time (the same lame excuse of a programmer, the truth was I was very lazy )

Well today I found an alternative to WinSCP, it’s called WinSCP. My plea is answered and WinSCP now supports FTP too. Thanks Martin and the other WinSCP guys. You rock!

And now my search for a FXP client has started. So guys, any recommendation?

Tags: Client, FXP, winscp

If you are wondering why my site is lacking its original design then it’s because I am participating in the CSS Naked day 07 like last year.

Well, if you are going to ask me what is CSS Naked day then here is the extract from the official site.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words.

If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.

Happy stripping

Tags: css, CSSNakedDay, WordPress

Well guys I need a recommendation from you.

I have been using WinSCP as my SFTP client for quite sometime and I am extremely happy about it. In particular I like the Keep Remote Directory up to date feature of WinSCP. But one problem with WinSCP is that it doesn’t support plain FTP.

So I started looking for a FTP program which supports plain FTP and has the Keep Remote Directory up to date feature. All my googling efforts became fruitless and I have decided to seek the help of thee. So recommend me some good alternatives for WinSCP.

Update (05 - May - 2007) : My plea was answered. Check out my updated article.

Tags: ftp, winscp

Recently I found that some of my pages were not of valid XHTML Strict doctype and the culprit is the target attribute in my tag which I used to open external pages in new window.

With a little bit of googling I found that I was not the only one who is facing this issue. In addition to that I also found lot of hacks and JavaScript scripts to make the links open in a new window without using the target attribute. Notable among them are this Sitepoint article and the recent one by Roger.

Time to decide, whether I have to the remove target attribute or use these JavaScript hacks or make my XHTML documents as transitional doctype. I am certainly not interested to use the JavaScript hacks but at the same time don’t want to go back to transitional doctype also.

Since this is my personal site I had the liberty to choose what ever I wanted and I have decided to leave it as it is. But my decision would have been different (or would have taken more time) if it was one of my client’s pages. So here after all my pages will have the XHTML Strict doctype and also the target attribute. After all rules are meant to be broken right what do you guys say?

Tags: strict, target, validation, XHTML

I was just wondering how the result array of the getElementsByTagName function will be sorted. Will it be elements of the array be sorted in the order in which they appear in the document or is it completely random? And how does it behave in different browsers?

Can anyone shed more lights on this or provide me some pointers?

Self Note (by my evil twin): Sudar, you have become lazier these days. If you are not getting a response take the pain to test it across different browses by yourself!!

Tags: DOM, getElementsByTagName, Javascript

It’s been a month since I started playing with Python and I was able to tame it and now it has become a good pet.

Many guys asked me what my favorite IDE for Python is after seeing my crush for IDE’s and my interest with Python.

Well, initially I was using the default IDLE which came with Python distribution and after getting a hold of the syntax I started using PyDEV, a plugin for Eclipse. PyDEV lets you to use all the features of Eclipse for developing both Python and Jython programs.

If you are looking for a decent, free IDE for Python then PyDEV will surely suit your needs.

I have solved some exercise problems from books I have used to learn Python and will try to post them here after refining them a bit.

Any one else playing with Python?

Tags: PyDEV, Python

After getting lot of recommendations I have started with Python and here are my thought on it after fiddling with it for the past two weeks.

With in a couple of hours into Python it became evident to me that I have taken the right decision. It’s really very powerful and also you write very minimal but robust code when compared with other languages. Python has the right balance between syntax easiness and powerfulness. Like Java the designers of Python have designed it such a way so that it discourages bad coding but at the same time have not made it too bulky in syntax.

The following are some of the features which I like in Python, presented in no particular order

• No statement delimiter - not even braces to represent block of code, just plain indentations.
• Very very powerful built-in library - It has almost all the features that you want.
• Built in support for complex data types like list and dictionary.
• Short hand multiple assignment statements.
• Powerful introspection
• List comprehensions

and the list goes on…

I have already finished reading Swaroop’s Byte of Python and am currently half way through Mark’s Dive into Python.

If you are a beginner to Python that Byte of Python is an excellent book and once you get a hang of the syntax you can read Dive into Python which teaches you the advanced concepts.

Tags: ByteOfPython, DiveIntoPython, Python