Mathias Bank

Gerade auf ein sehr hübsches Script mit dem Namen Simple Controls Gallery gestoßen, das es sehr angenehm macht, mehrere Bilder auf einer Seite anzuzeigen. Insbesondere in manchen von mir betreuten Shops könnte ich mir das Script sehr gut vorstellen, wenn mehr als ein Produkt-Bild zur Verfügung steht. Da hab ich nämlich oft das Problem, dass hauptsächlich nur ein Produktbild existiert. Wenn aber mehrere Bilder auftauchen, dann sehen diese entweder “angehängt” aus oder - wenn nur ein Bild existiert - es gibt viel Leerraum. Das Script könnte dieses Dilemma sehr gut lösen.

For my PhD thesis, I’m looking for technics to visualize statistical data. I’m very happy to see, that there are good professional tools, but there are also very good open source solutions:

Of course, there exists a jQuery plugin called Flot. There is also a very good plugin for Mochikit called PlotKit. Both JavaScript chart technics us SVG to visualize the data (IE needs hacks of couse). In this way, it is very easy to use JavaScript for interaction. Very nice!

There is also a really nice project, which can create Flash Diagramms with the help of PHP: the Open Flash Project. Here again, it is possible to use JavaScript for interaction.

And the best: they use nice licences! Flot is under MIT licence, Plokit uses BSD and a part of it uses the apache licence, Open Flash Chart is LGPL/MIT.

Are there any other interesting projects?

Until now, it was a really big problem to devide structure and data in JavaScript. It seems now, that there will be solutions soon. There is a plugin which helps you to use templates. As far as I can see, it will be a part of UserInterface. Very interessting.

The author wants du discuss about the plugin.

These days, I have written a software, which extensively uses JavaScript. In this way, I wanted to call functions after the user has done specific actions. How can I do this?

The old way:
After each action, I have to write my functions, which should be called. This method works, of course. But it is not clear. It is more interesting to define my functions and than I want to define, after which actions these functions should be called. That should be done without changing the action. So I have tried to use jQuery for this way.

The new way:
jQuery offers the ability to abstract event handling between browsers. And this abstraction is done very well. It allows to expand possible events.

Imagine, you have an action called “action1″. I want to register some functions, which should be called in this action. So try this:

It’s easy to call function1 and function2 in action1 now: Just write…

… to the end of your action. That’s it. You can add new functions easily by binding them. Even no binding is possible (if there is no function, which should be called).

Some time ago, I have written a small jQuery plugin to easily get GET-Variables. The plugin is used by a lot of people. But it doesn’t satisfy all possibilities, you need.

Today, I have rewritten the plugin. It is now able to:

• Parse GET parameters of the document $(document).getUrlParam("param1");
• Parse image or JavaScript links with the help of the ID $("#javaScriptFile1").getUrlParam("ajaxUrl");

The last method helps you to clearly separate html/php and JavaScript. I need it, because my php script is generating a special value. Now, I want to use this value in JavaScript, but I don’t want to write the value to my html-page (clear unobtrusive JavaScript). So I include the JavaScript file like this:

With this plugin, it is very easy to get the value of param ajaxUrl.

Have fun! Here is the source.

[Update]
The plugin is now able to handle href attributes, too. It checks now

• if you want a document parameter
• or there is a src attribute
• or there is a href attribute
• else it returns null