JavaScript Blog

As Ivo Jansch pointed out on the Ibuildings blog, there’s barely a month left till security fixes are discontinued for PHP 4. While support for PHP 4 officially ended last December, security updates were offered until 08-08-08. Most major web hosts have been phasing out PHP 4 support, but many legacy applications built with PHP 4 in mind are currently in use, and the more intricate will take quite some time to move to PHP 5. Here are some tips and resources for managing the migration process. (more…)

jGrowl is a plugin for the jQuery that generates unobtrusive notification boxes on a page. It has a similar design to the OS X Growl Framework, after which it is named. With jGrowl, web developers can easily display brief information messages and alerts to their users during busy sessions with complex web applications. (more…)

There aren’t too many free options for charting on the web, either client-side or server-side, that provide you with the actual charting code. We recently reviewed Google Charts, a web-based API for charting from Google. However, either for internal controls, or just simplicity of implementation, sometimes you need to do your own charting with a free software solution. Here are some of the better options, both purely JavaScript/Flash, as well as those with server-side bindings. (more…)

We’ve been looking at what makes a good Web Application design good. We’ll continue that thought with Mint.com the financial account managing software.

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For client-side web developers, maintaining history - and working with the default “back” and “forward” browser buttons - can be a major challenge for building an effective AJAX web application. As HTTP is fundamentally stateless, the current URL has long been the standard for recording a user’s current “location”. With the Really Simply History library, developers can embrace this concept using a simple Javascript library to maintain history for their AJAX applications. (more…)

When putting together your web application, there are a number of reasons why you might want to force some HTTP requests. For example, Facebook recently scaled their new Facebook Chat feature from 0 to 70 million users overnight, by thoroughly load testing it with silent HTTP requests from clients. You might also want to record a request on a target page on another domain. In this mini tutorial, I’ll show you how to force client-side HTTP requests using pure JavaScript. (more…)

I recently developed a new logo for a social networking community. The site needed a logo so I began work right away. Here are a few tips that came to me after completing the task.

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There’s a buzz spreading through the web design community like a virus. It’s called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). What is sIFR? Essentially, it’s a technology that replaces short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in the typeface of your choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

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When it comes to making your site important, platforms trounce software hands down. Facebook learned this the easy way; today, the myriad of Facebook applications available make the social networking site a typical destination for a significant proportion of internet users. Indeed, many users now browse new content on their favourite sites via their respective Facebook apps. Platform wins. Yahoo! is about to accomplish the same, this time in web search, and has opted for PHP.

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Image heavy websites have one problem: load time. So if you’re designing a Wordpress theme that relies heavily on images like one made in Photoshop, you want to do everything you can to increase speed. a) You want the images to display as shortly after the text does as possible and b) you want to do everything to help users on slower connections.

One way to do this is with javascript, the other way is with CSS.

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