I will miss you WADE. You have been a lot of fun in the time that I’ve known you. I feel we have truly grown together.

…

But seriously. This has been an awesome class. Thanks a lot Michael!

This week, during a particularly boring lecture in another subject, I decided to pull up trusty W3Schools and give it a whirl.

I actually find it really straight forward and easy! Not that I am a pro just from W3Schools tutorials, but the basics of the language are quite simple.

I look forward to learning you more, my new found language. =]

Whilst I wanted to use PHP this time around for posting to the server, I was unable to get it working in time, so I’ve stuck with the javascript. I find the javascript messy and a lot of it redundant though. In future, I’ll be using PHP.

My assignments all ready to be handed in for tomorrow.. I’ll miss you Mr Cornell Notes! We’ve had some good times. =]

I’m working at Equip which is just a jewellery and accessory store. Whilst the work is alright and the people are ok, I really only took it for a bit of extra spending money.

I’ll be really busy for next sem, so lucky I’m only doing 3 subjects.

I’m really going to miss this class, it has been truly aweseme. =D

I got another web design job!! Just a simple brochure site for the Gold Coast Knights, a soccer club. That will be completed from the 18th-24th December.

And gues what else?!

I then have the Croatia Club website to do after New Years. Its just a restaurant, that will want another brochure site.

My wallet and I are going to be enjoying these holidays. ^_^

It is free for use by all web developers under the BSD license.

JQuery and YUI are essentially the same. The official Yahoo UI library website states that the library predominantly manipulates the following

• DOM element selections using the cross-browser open source selector engine Sizzle
• DOM traversal and modification
• Events
• CSS manipulation
• Effects and animations
• Ajax
• Extensibility
• Utilities – such as browser version and the each function.

I couldn’t find any examples of YUI and JQuery performing the same task, so thanks Lorance, here is his example =]

YUI:

YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(['test', 'test2'], 'opacity', 0.5);
var opacity = YAHOO.util.Dom.getStyle('test2', 'opacity');

JQuery:

$("#test, #test2").css("opacity", 0.5);
var opacity = $("#test2").css("opacity");

The main difference that can be immediately seen is the length of the lines. Whilst JQuery uses the
dollar symbol ($) to reference the libary, YUI uses YAHOO.util.DOM. This means that lines are longer,
and there is a lot of redundant repition of code.
Finally, JQuery selects the elements, then manipulates them. YUI encapsulates these two steps into one,
and I find this vaguely confusing. 

I far prefer JQuery. Woohooooo for Jquery! =]

Google Apps’ official website states the following features -

URL Fetch

Applications can access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data, using App Engine’s URL fetch service. The URL fetch service retrieves web resources using the same high-speed Google infrastructure that retrieves web pages for many other Google products.

Mail

Applications can send email messages using App Engine’s mail service. The mail service uses Google infrastructure to send email messages.

Memcache

The Memcache service provides your application with a high performance in-memory key-value cache that is accessible by multiple instances of your application. Memcache is useful for data that does not need the persistence and transactional features of the datastore, such as temporary data or data copied from the datastore to the cache for high speed access.

Image Manipulation

The Image service lets your application manipulate images. With this API, you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images in JPEG and PNG formats.

Scheduled Tasks and Task Queues

An application can perform tasks outside of responding to web requests. Your application can perform these tasks on a schedule that you configure, such as on a daily or hourly basis. Or, the application can perform tasks added to a queue by the application itself, such as a background task created while handling a request.

Difference between Google Apps and Ruby on Rails

• Predominant Language – Whilst Ruby on Rails uses Ruby, Google Apps provides support for Ruby, Python and Java.
• Server Location – Whilst Google Apps specifies that the application must be stored on Google infrastructure, a Ruby on Rails project can be stored on any web server.
• Database – Whilst Ruby on Rails will allow connection to any database, Google Apps specifies that the application uses its own, generic Google database.

MVC

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, an architecture pattern to organise application programming. It has inbuilt capability to steer developers into this organisation pattern.  For example, a database named “name” will automatically be created and assigned when a class named “name” is created.

Active Record

Ruby on Rails is seperated into various “packages”, one of which is named Active Record. Active record uses object-relational mapping (ORM).  “Active Record connects business objects and database tables to create a persistent domain model where logic and data are presented in one wrapping.” (ar.rubyonrails.org) As such, Active Record is an integral part of the Ruby on Rails environment.

Naming Convention

Ruby on Rails employs a system called “Convention over Configuration”. This means that the system will automatically name many of the objects in the project to avoid confusion for the user. As mentioned before, databases are automatically named when the class is created. This means that specialised code only needs to be written when a user specifically wishes to deviate the automatically assigned names. As such, there is far less code repition and redundant naming within Ruby on Rails projects.

1. Atom Syndication Format
2. Atom Publishing Protocol

Atom Syndication Format is a language used to store web feeds or blogs, whilst Atom Publishing Protocol allows the creation and updating of web feeds.

ATOM was designed to replace RSS – due to the creator’s (Ben Trott) opinion that RSS was limited by it need to stay backwards compatible and its lack of ongoing innovation.

Wikipedia (come on, we all use it) states the following points as the main barriers to adoption -

• Despite the emergence of Atom as an IETF Proposed Standard and the decision by major companies such as Google to embrace Atom, use of the older and better-known RSS formats has continued.
• RSS 2.0 support for enclosures led directly to the development of podcasting. While many podcasting applications, such as iTunes, support the use of Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 remains the preferred format.^[5]
• Many sites choose to publish their feeds in only a single format. For example CNN and the New York Times offer their web feeds only in RSS 2.0 format.
• News articles about web syndication feeds have increasingly used the term “RSS” to refer generically to any of the several variants of the RSS format such as RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 as well as the Atom format.^[6][7]
• Each of the various web syndication feed formats has attracted large groups of supporters who remain satisfied by the specification and capabilities of their respective formats.
• Sites that publish Atom will often publish RSS as well.

Here is an example of ATOM, also from wikipedia -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

	<title>Example Feed</title>
	<subtitle>A subtitle.</subtitle>
	<link href="http://example.org/feed/" rel="self" />
	<link href="http://example.org/" />
	<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b91C-0003939e0af6</id>
	<updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
	<author>
		<name>John Doe</name>
		<email>johndoe@example.com</email>
	</author>

	<entry>
		<title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
		<link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03" />
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.html"/>
		<link rel="edit" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03/edit"/>
		<id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
		<updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
		<summary>Some text.</summary>
	</entry>

</feed>

Here is an example of a JSON object -

var myJSONObject = {"bindings": [
        {"ircEvent": "PRIVMSG", "method": "newURI", "regex": "^http://.*"},
        {"ircEvent": "PRIVMSG", "method": "deleteURI", "regex": "^delete.*"},
        {"ircEvent": "PRIVMSG", "method": "randomURI", "regex": "^random.*"}
    ]
};

The example above creates a JSON object with a member named “bindings” which contains an array of three objects.

Members can easily be retrieved -

myJSONObject.bindings[0].method

JSON was created for data transportation. As such, its main rival is XML. Whilst both have their strengths and weaknesses, I chose to use XML for Assignment 1. This was because text stored with JSON need to be manually parsed, where XML data can simply be surrounded by CDATA tags.

However, although JSON does not provide comprehensive parsing capabilities, the contents of any JSON object are far easier to view, edit and delete, as the programmer doesn’t need to understand the document object model and how to traverse it.

All in all, JSON is a viable possibility when looking at data transport. However, due to its lack of parsing capabilities and my lack of enthusiasm to do it manually, I will probably continue to use XML in the second assignment.