Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Publishing XML to the web with XSLT: a replacement for the presentation layer

February 1st, 2010 – Web Development (, , , ) 6 Comments »
XSLT

Most web APIs and data feeds are built to consume and produce XML data. RSS, SOAP, REST, ATOM, AJAX, web-services, indeed, even XHTML itself is a form of XML. If you publish anything to the web you’re probably publishing XML in some form or another. Many web developers work with some flavor of XML every day.

However few have heard of XSLT, a standard language adopted by the W3C a decade ago for styling XML data for user consumption. XSLT, or XSL Transform, is a real language, part of XSL, the XML Stylesheet Language. XSLT is a tool for reformatting XML data, literally an XML stylesheet. This powerful language lets you convert XML data into almost any other XML structure you could imagine, including completely valid and functional XHTML.

Simply put, if your web application has been built to produce XML for feeds or APIs, then you do not need to build another set of logic to make a web version. You can let web browsers hit the service, just as you would for feeds or APIs. Just create an XSLT and link it from your XML document. All modern browsers will render the XSLT and display it as a normal web page.

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External templates for the DataView control: Microsoft Ajax Library 4.0

January 29th, 2010 – Web Development (, , , ) No Comments »
ASP.NET AJAX Logo

One of the best things about templates is how portable they are. You can build a template for a particular piece of presentation and then use that template everywhere you need it. In fact you can have several templates to choose from, giving you themes and different ways of displaying the same data.

This is a very powerful and very maintainable technique. Portable template files are a great example of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principal and are a good idea for any template that will see reuse.

The new DataView control in the latest beta of the Microsoft Ajax Library version 4.0 (aka the ASP.NET AJAX Library) has a fine template engine built into it. Unfortunately, those templates must be embedded in the page markup. If it’s your project then you can simply use an ascx User Control, or a ContentPlaceHolder or an Html.RenderPartial, but what if you need to be able to use the template on a static file, or a clients site, or even in another framework? You can’t have portable template files that you can just call anywhere. Well, you can, but you have to use a workaround technique.

This is one technique that I came up with for importing a template file into a page. This lets me have one (or a selection of) template files that I can use everywhere for a portable JavaScript widget. It has no dependencies other than the Microsoft Ajax Library.

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Must-have Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers & Designers

January 27th, 2010 – Web Development (, , , ) 4 Comments »
Firefox Logo

Mozilla Firefox is by far my favorite web browser. It is secure, feature packed, and very well maintained with a great community behind it. It is also the web developers’ best friend, with tons of built-in tools and user created add-ons to help people creating web sites. In my opinion, because of the array of tools available and the quality of the product, every web developer should already be using Firefox as their main browser.

This is an arbitrary list of my favorite Firefox add-ons for web development. These tools have fundamentally changed how I design and develop web pages. With these tools I can accomplish tasks in minutes that would have taken me hours just four years ago.

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Excessive JavaScript and AJAX: bad practice & broken pages

January 24th, 2010 – Web Development (, , , , , ) 5 Comments »
AJAX Logo

I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code and I love the language. I have used it on almost every site that I’ve worked on in the last 10 years. It makes web pages and web applications so much better in every way. That is, if it’s used correctly, in moderation.

However, for the last few years it feels like I’ve had to spend more time explaining why we should not use JavaScript than I do actually writing scripts. This is a trend that I’ve noticed more and more as the web matures. An ever increasing number people believe that JavaScript is the solution to everything. Many take this idea so far that they believe it’s okay to say that we don’t support users without JavaScript.

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An IDE for PHP that doesn’t suck

January 22nd, 2010 – Web Development (, , , ) 5 Comments »
phpDesigner Logo

A few months ago I commented on how PHP needs an IDE and a membership provider. Well, I’m still waiting on the membership provider, but I’m happy to say that I’ve finally found an IDE that doesn’t suck, phpDesigner. phpDesigner is a complete IDE for PHP based web development. It is a pretty simple idea but this one seems to have actually pulled it off. If you’re looking for a Windows PHP IDE, this one is certainly worth a look.

This development environment isn’t perfect, that is to say it’s not Visual Studio smooth, but it is far better than anything else that I’ve tried for PHP. It has all of the basic features that I’ve been looking for in a PHP IDE that runs on Windows.

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