jQuery Mobile

First, jQuery mobile just entered Beta3. Lots of bugfixes but also one cool thing that has been baking for a while, real fixed footers and headers are available in the framework. Before that, jQuery fixed stuff was just a gimmick with the fixed bars disappearing when scrolling, now you got the real deal, well sort of. It’s unfortunately only available for ios5, meaning not a big lot of people will see it.

Android does not really support fixed positioning yet, it however supports overflow:scrolltouch. But it seems the jQ teams decided to only implement position:fixed for everybody. There is a nice video of the feature here.

Sencha Touch

Sencha kind of went off the radar for sometimes now, but they just announced something really hot. Sencha Touch version 2 will include a native packaging that will automatically transform your web apps into native apps on android and ios, on osx and windows.

Now I don’t know if they really went there and added ios app native packaging on Windows, but that would be legend… wait for it… wait for it… legendary! More information here.

Sublime text 2, the new holy grail of editing

Okay, I know VIM is powerful (hello sys admins ) and Emacs got a weird following but here we got a game changer. It got the snippets power of textmate (all tm bundle works, mostly), the extensibility of VIM and the split view of E, all in a nice package, available on Windows, OSX and Linus. Meaning you will never have to fear coding on any platform. A part maybe from your web server.

Obviously I am excited, I moved my tm bundles and started playing around with it but it is too soon to tell if the relation will last. If you want some tips and tricks on using Sublime 2 I recommend having a look at this article on nettuts.

This is why I started BackboneFU, in my wildest dreams it would become the resource for Backbone. Anyone who wants to write about backbone will be accepted on the website, so if you want to write something, or already wrote something on your blog and donate the article also on BakcbonFU, you are welcome to do so. There is a nice bio for authors on each articles.

I also added one article recently, Front-end developers to backbone.js.

So there you have it, BackboneFU lives

Confoo conference

This year I am trying to do a talk at the Confoo conference, basically it’s an introduction course at code organization with jQuery, called jQuery Spaghetti. It’s probably not for most of you guys and I know it has been done in other js conferences, but I feel like Confoo will have quite a bit of ‘hobby’ jQuery devs since it’s really a diverse conference about all web technologies (hoo and it is also in french). Still, if you like the idea and you’re in Montreal, I could use a vote or 2 for my talk. (You can downvote too, any feedback is appreciate!)

Self-publishing a book

Did you know that anyone can wrote a book and self-publish it these days? and I am not talking about doing a pdf, I’m talking about a paperback book available from amazon. This is what lulu.com and createspace.com are offering. It does all the hard work for you (well beside writing the book of course).

It’s quite impressive to upload a pdf and have a paperback available from online stores, and even physical book stores with lulu.

A book on css, really?

Yup, I am writing a book about html and css templating, this has been done 30 times you might say, but I really think the approach I am taking has not been that used. In this book I am not talking about HTML5, CSS3, grids, etc. I am talking about doing templating efficiently on deadlines with a cross-browsers angle.

The book will walk you through 2 examples (a website homepage and an email), and explain you the problems you will encounter along the way. I’m already 80% done with the writing, but doing image assets takes quite a bit of times.

A book looking professional

Obviously if you are authoring a book, you want it to look professional. Unfortunatly most of us are not designers. Fortunately there is a couple of inDesign book template available, I even found one free, and its a really nice book template.

I am going to spare you the details of my adventure with them, you can find all the details here. Let’s just say that I bought some furniture and I am really not happy with it.

War, guerrilla style!

I was so pissed off about my discussion with their customer support that I decided to create a website to tell everyone about how shitty The Brick is, and I did it in little more than 4 hours. First thing first, I bought a nice domain name, thebrickwarranty.com. My host, webfaction, has some pre-install softwares, turns out wordpress is one of them. Not that it’s hard to install of course, but it is quite satisfying to have it up in running in 10 seconds.

Ok, but what about the design?

My friend Google told me that there is quite a few nice free themes around, and I found a spectacular one too. I just did a couple of small template tweaking to fit my needs.

I also needed a couple of plugins,

Disqus – The super nice commenting system that handles everything.
Share on facebook – Well a sharing plugin
wp super cache – Hey, using less resources is always good

The longest thing was finding the Facebook sharing plugin! Of course I needed a Twitter account too, I decided to use the nice concept of BP global PR, which was making fun of BP disaster PR campaign, I registered @thebrickwarranty. I was very disappointed, but not surprised, to find out that The Brick does not even own a Twitter account. HEH!

This was the final result, the brick warranty

Now that’s all nice, but I needed people to find me and I needed to get on the first page with the “The Brick” keyword. Turns out there also quite a few people pissed at them, so I tried to advertise thebrickwarranty.com on different consumer forums, with mitigate results.

Google Adword

I had this 100$ Google ad voucher code taking dust for a while, what a nice way to try Adword! Turns out, The Brick is an expensive keyword and it didn’t last long.

One nice thing however, with Google Analytic I saw that some people find the website on keywords like “the brick dining set”, which is pretty cool, over time I am pretty sure my ranking on this type of keywords will become better.

Reflecting on all this

In the end I surely invested more time than it was worth the trouble. I contacted their customer support linking my new website in hope it might at least get a “*(&(u*” from a director or a vice-president, I did not got a response yet. I’m still happy I did it, mission accomplished.

Making a framework choice

Where do I start? like anyone I guess, I check for the best framework to learn. Obviously I am not going to create my own MVC framework, some of the best php guys are already doing that (And also I suck at doing php). And I am not going to use a CMS, not enough barebone to do an app, less extensible and also more security problems (plus I hate Joomla and Drupal). So I browse the web, django, ruby on rail, Zend, Symfony, so much languages and frameworks, so much choice!

In the end I decided to stay with php, I already know php a bit and learning an entire language felt like a waste of time, I ni mi ni ma nimo, I stop on Kohana and Symfony.

Kohana feels like jQuery I would say, I can do some basic stuff quite easily.
Symfony, feel a bit like Dojo, it’s effing huge, and not as easy as Kohana.

That being said, Symfony had a lot of features I wanted, a bigger community and a better documentation, so in the end, Symfony won my challenge. Diving right into it, I start the Symfony in 24 days book. Okay, so yeah, setting up environments check, learning a bit of the ORM check, learning a bit of the command system check, Okay my head hurts now.

Don’t even get me started with the Symfony form framework, I really hate how they automatically generate your forms. That being said, it still is really useful, the idea is to generate a form linked to your database table, so this make it really easy to save new entries.

In fact it look like this: $form->save(); .. yeah that easy. Like I said I am not a fan of how they automatically generate the form with table though, but you can mold it as you want, and generate each label and input separately.

My head is being pounded

You really can’t be efficient when you’re learning, getting stuck each day at doing something that should be easy.

Who knew doing back-end was so hard! You got to manage Cron, sql, orm, MVC frameworks, routing… I feel like I should have started learning this a long time ago. When I was in school has a Multimedia Integrator I learned ASP (not .net), a pure waste of time. Now they learn PHP but I’m not even sure if they even have any remotely idea of what MVC mean, which is bad, as most of everything they do will be in front-end developer will be in a similar environnement.

The documentation

Probably the best thing about Symfony is it’s documentation. You get a crazy amount of information from the get-go. With one of the free book, you can create a job posting website in 24 days. I used a lot of information from this book to create my application.

It really give you a good feel on how the anatomy of any application should be like using Symfony.

Symfony as a framework of choice for front-end developers?

I found in Symfony what I guess most people found in Ruby on rails from what I read on the web. The framework really give you the tools you need to create web application, so you can really concentrate on your app instead of focusing on integrating swift mailer, managing your database relations and others. It really gives you a big abstracted layer of everything you will need to create your next thing.

But I also saw a lot of front-end developers on twitter doing ruby and django, I guess it is a matter of taste after all…

I will be updating the documentation today, but the most up to date doc will always be the readme on github. The legacy 1.7 documentation and download can be found under package when you hit download on github

Time to stop squeezing ketchup (inside joke) and hail to the beast.

The rewrite was done by Olivier Refalo, I wanted to do a rewrite for some times but a lack of time and passion about this stopped me. The script was near 3 years old and while I was happy with it, to stay in a “modern” javascript world it needed significant changes.

The core of the library stayed the same, but what is wrapping is a lot better, Olivier also did a nice rewrite of the ajax validation function. I am really happy on how it turned out.

The merge should be done by the end of the week, I will also link to a legacy api and I will add the api page to the 1.7.3 bundle, so don’t worry about loosing the old documentation.

It certainly feels weird, when you think about it, that this year conference was all about adding complexity to your code when the most probable reason why jQuery as so much market share is because of its simplicity.

In the keynote, John Resig said that jQuery constantly gaining share momentum and was something like on 30% of overall websites, on the web. That’s huge. I also personally saw a tendency with others framework to use jQuery at its core for DOM interaction. jQuery is probably more popular than “javascript” itself!

Like Rebecca Murphey once said, if you really looking to do advanced javascript application, you maybe should also look into a more complete framework like Dojo.

Speaking of Rebecca, I was particularly flabbergasted by her talk about code organization and modules. I think I am currently where she was when she started to search for a better path to code organization.

There were also a lot of mentions about lazy script loading with labJS et RequireJS and loose coupling with custom events and pub/sub and other nice jQuery plugins.

I really liked all those talks that were talking about a more advanced way to do jQuery, but when you think that most of the technologies (plugins) presented were less than 1 year old.. I just hope that the “normal” developers mass that is not really following the trends is ready for all of this goodness.

I can really see a line between jQuery developers that want to level up and those that just want to do their “thing” with the DOM.

Some food for thoughts:

• Managing JavaScript Objects – Nicholas Zakas
• Functionality-Focused Code Organization – Rebecca Murphey
• Alex Saxton on javascript and jQuery pattern
• Using Objects to Organize Your Code – Rebecca Murphey
• Javascript: The Good Parts (Chapter 5) (book) -Douglas Crockford
• Prototypal Inheritance in Javascript -Douglas Crockford
• JavaScript Patterns (new) -Stoyan Stefanov

Jquery Mobile

There is another really cool thing that happened at the Boston Conference. The jQuery team released a preview (alpha release) of there mobile framework.

One thing is sure, if you think jQuery is full of magic, well you will see unicorns flying in this one. This framework is an odd beast. You control it, mostly by HTML. Meaning that if you create a simple app, like a mobile version of a blog, you will probably not write one line of jQuery or CSS. A typical example that would be instantly ajaxified and cssified by the framework:

This is a really closed way of doing things, at least if you compare it to Sencha Touch or jQtouch. One thing that have come up for example, when you create a select form element, it replaces it with a jQueryfied html version, and they forgot to add a changed event on it.

I think the jQuery mobile framework will be full of surprise like this. Really easy to use, but probably a bit hard to get really custom applications.

That being said, jQuery mobile is the only framework that aim to support a freaking lot of mobile browsers. Sencha and jQtouch are currently only supporting webkit mobile. The more the framework control all your code the less, you the developer, will break your mobile website on less capable phones, like the Blackberry, which is, a pretty big market in the corporate world.

That’s it!

Bonus

A video that I found really inspirational on javascript module management.

Unfortunately jQuery 1.4.3 has a bug when using live with attribute not equal selector in Firefox, and this is exactly what I use in my validation engine.

I also moved my code to github, why? Because Github is hot.

http://github.com/posabsolute/jQuery-Validation-Engine