tcf{tc}

Today, most web applications have the ability for the user to share various types of information. Blogs allow readers to post comments, email clients are fully web-based, social wiki sites let people submit revisions, and so forth. All of this is possible because of the oldest HTML element-the <form>.The form is submitted via the HTTP protocol to the server, and its individual elements, such as text fields and text areas are processed on the server-for example, stored in the relational database-emailed, or put into a flat file. By default, the form is submitted as plain text, which is not a good way to express any formatting or styles of the contents. For example, if you want to emphasize some words, and type your text in a standard text area, you have no way to make some words stand out or even use a different font.

The general solution is to use HTML markup with the text, to indicate the formatting and styles. In this article, I will look at several implementations of Rich Text Editors (RTE) that dynamically apply HTML markup to plain text before it is submitted to the server. I will show how to install several versions of the editor widgets, and then compare them.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, I will look at the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library in more detail. The YUI is an AJAX framework, but it is also a generic JavaScript library that provides a lot of Web 2.0 widgets or UI elements, effects, and tools for web developers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web 2.0 can be thought of as two concurrent and unrelated things: advances in technology and a new business model for web companies.

This article will examine the Web 2.0 movement and what it means for the end clients, what Web 2.0 means for the web UI, and which technologies enable the new features. In particular, it will talk about the new companies that joined the movement, and look at some of the technology that powers Web 2.0.

It will also discuss what it means to code in "web2.0 style" with some more advanced features of the Script.aculo.us framework and explore the Dojo toolkit.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, I will discuss the Direct Web Remoting (DWR) technology developed by Joe Walker and maintained by the small IT consultancy Getahead in UK. This technology is a unique way of Ajax-enabling existing Java server-side code by exposing it in JavaScript. This sounds complicated but, in reality, the technology is relatively straightforward. It has some limitations, such as exposing overloaded Java methods or marshaling of very complex Java Objects to JavaScript and will work only in a web application server. But overall, DWR is a very powerful concept that works with any existing Java web application and makes the process of web remoting easier.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, I will discuss implementing an Ajax-enabled scrollable table, in which rows are dynamically fetched from the server, as the user scrolls, without the whole page refreshing. This technique is unique and very convenient for implementing pages with a lot of dynamic content in a readable form; for instance, a live news feed. As new items are added to the table, the vertical scroll bar will resize and the never-ending scroll will continue. The asynchronous fetching of the data is done with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). The parsing and dynamic row insertions are done in JavaScript, the requests are done with the XMLHttpRequest object, and the table appearance is controlled by the CSS.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, I will look at the latest and upcoming releases of the Spring Java framework. In one of my previous articles, "Spring: the Eclectic Framework," I discussed the Spring application framework. But since then, Interface21, the company responsible for development and support of the framework, implemented many new features and has released version 2.0 of Spring. The upcoming preview edition 2.1 is already underway, and I will discuss what has changed and improved in this new version over the previous one. Because the Spring framework is an aggregation of various components and modules, its parts have evolved differently, but overall version 2.1 is a major improvement over version 1.x and a sizable improvement over 2.0.

Read the rest of this entry »