Bearfruit

I have a theory and so far it has worked out correctly. There are three ways to complete a web application project. The wrong way is to skip the planning step and just start designing and coding. This greatly decreases the chance of finishing your project. However there are two ways that I’ve used to complete projects:

I was talking to a good friend of mine - one of the most elite graphic designers I know - and he made a simple comment that, as often happens when speaking to someone of great wisdom, communicated something with tremendous meaning in only a few words. It was something I knew but would have been hard pressed to describe or communicate to others.

It was about using graphics on websites but has a far broader scope than that. I’ll reword his statement somewhat to remove the context of the original conversation. He said that if you notice the drop shadows then the designer has failed.

My current task will be assisted by showing an iframe but without the distinctive scrolling of an iframe. So if the iframe content is 350px high the iframe should be 350px high so that it appears to be part of the content above and below it. I’ve seen people refer to this technique as “100% height iframes” but I think that’s a misnomer or at least confusing since some people want an iframe that fills the height of its parent container. I just want an iframe that looks and acts as if its content were part of the normal page content and not on a separate site.

This isn’t so hard to do when your content is all on the same domain but when you need to work across domains its far more difficult because of the same domain security policies all browsers enforce. But there are ways to do it and the way I’m using now is clever and not well documented on the web. As a matter of fact, if it is documented I couldn’t find it. It does not require an iframe within an iframe nor does it require that the iframe’s content be tailored to the site that will be embedding the iframe. I’d love to hear any advice or suggestions for making it better.

OK, here’s the problem… you want to test a website by sending custom headers, but the website uses https. Normally you’d just telnet to port 80 like so:

telnet www.somesite 80
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.somesite


(Note you need to press enter twice at the end)

This would be a valid HTTP GET request and you’d see the server’s response headers and response data. But with an SSL website this won’t work at all. What do you do?

Strong words, I know, and there are definitely some qualifying statements. I am not throwing out Eclipse just yet because it can still do some things that Netbeans doesn’t. But first, let me say that I’m excited by Netbeans 6.1, which is currently in Beta. I’m excited because I see in it a product that will challenge Microsoft’s Visual Studio, especially for new users and those doing development without a computer science background.

PHP web applications tend to be very easy to deploy. You simply upload the application and it works. Maybe your application needs to have an install.php that creates the database tables but that’s hardly difficult.

The next easiest applications are cgi apps. In addition to uploading, users need to know if they have a special cgi-bin folder that they upload to and ensure they upload to it. They also need to know how to make a file executable. However no server configuration needs to be done.

A year ago I was making my decision on a javascript library. At that time I felt Mootools was the best deal. It was small, it was easy to learn, the ajax was dead simple (and needed no stupid tricks like reading the HTTP header for json data), it had beautiful effects and it was fast. It was far smaller than dojo and mochikit and it was a toss-up between it and jQuery as to which would dominate in the “market” that they both shared.

I’ve done a couple little projects using the fabulous Blueprint CSS Framework lately. Let me just say, this rocks for getting your stuff done quickly. It allows you to create fixed-width layouts much faster than if you do your layout by hand. If you’ve already created your own CSS framework then it may not be a huge benefit, but you may still want to give it a try.

It works on the premise that you create a container that is a grid made of columns (by default, 24 columns 30px wide) and each column has a 10px gutter. Then, you assign styles to your elements that packs them into the grid. You can use an online application to generate a custom grid for you so that the result will be a layout that matches the widths you’ve specified for your site.

I am in an odd situation, maybe you can relate. I cannot easily serve dynamic content based on individual user/browser preferences. For me, its because my site is behind a somewhat dumb but effective caching proxy. However, this could as easily be applicable if you were hosting content on a site that only allowed static HTML content.

However, I’d still like to benefit from the phenomenal performance boost of using gzip’d Javascript and CSS (often a 70% reduction in file size). So is there a way to detect if the browser handles gzip’d media files using only client-side code? YES, here’s how:

Javascript is cool and things we only dreamed of 8 years ago are now common. However, the trends are leaning towards writing tremendous amounts of application code for web sites and web applications that run client-side in the web-browser. Sites are using more and more animation and effects. Now [people are contemplating][0] how to do cpu intensive computations in web browsers.