REST Services

REST - Respresentation State Transfer is recently been given much importance in the industry. REST is neither a programming language nor a tool. It is an architecture to build the network system.

Microsofts ADO.NET Data Service is build on the REST framework. There are some good webcasts and article about the ADO.NET data service in Microsoft website and its worth watching.

Jquery part 2 – Selectors

Jquery API provides an interface called “Selectors” which is a powerful component to filter the HTML elements based on the element name, id and element type.

The DOM elements can be selected with the Jquery function “$” or “jquery”. For example, the hyperlinks in the HTML pages can be retrieved using the selector $(a).

Following are the few examples of sample selectors that are very useful for DOM manipulation.

a – Retrieves all anchor links with the tag < a >.

#DOMElementID – Retrieves the DOM element with the id “DOMID”.

.DOMElementClass – Retrieves the DOM elements with the class “DOMClass”.

P a.DOMElementClass – Retrieves the DOM element links with the class “DOMClass” embedded within the tag < p >.

Ul > Li > a – Retrieves links which are children of list element

which are in turn children of < ul >.

A[href^=http://] – Retrieves links with an href value beginning with http://.

Div[type=text] – retrieves html text box.

P:odd – retrieves every odd paragraph elements.

Li:last-child – retrieves last child < li > of each < ul > element.

:radio:checked – retrieves radio buttons in the DOM that are checked.

:checkbox:checked – retrieves checkboxes in the Dom that are checked.

Input:not(:checkbox) – retrieves input elements from the DOM except checkboxes.

JQuery - Part 1

JQuery Fundamentals

Typically, the JavaScript was considered to be a clumpsy and difficult language to be used in the application development. The applications were designed to make use of javascript to support the validations, styles but the effort required to fix the browser compatibility superseded the benefit of client side scripting. Before the discovery of CSS the applications were developed by coupling the functionality and structure (HTML) together.

< type="button" id="”btnClick”" onclick="document.getElementById('txtName’).style.color='blue';">
Please click here
< / button>

The addition of CSS in the web development world allows us to separate the structure from the stylistic details of the HTML. It also gives us the flexibility to completely change the style by changing the different style sheet.

< type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
document.getElementById(' btnClick ').onclick = ChangeColor;
};

Function ChangeColor ()
{
document.getElementByID(‘txtName’).style.color = “Blue”
}
< / script>
< type="button">
Please click here

In the above example, the structure is separated from functionality. This approach of separating the structure from functionality through javascript is called “Unobtrusive Javascript”

The JQuery drew a huge attention amongst developer for its ability to support the development of unobtrusive JavaScript’s. JQuery works very well with the HTML page and performing operations on the DOM elements with significantly less lines of code. The scripts developed in JQuery model works well in all major browsers.

JQuery has great features like
DOM Selectors
DOM manipulation
Animation
HTML traversing

Great Quotes from the book "The one minute entrepreneur"

I had an opportunity to read the book "The one minute entrepreneur" free of cost :) in the book store. The book touches the greatest suggestion from various speakers from motivation gurus to sales gurus, management geniouses to traning gurus. One thing i picked after reading that book was writing down on the book about what we learned on that day.
The authors suggests that "To be a succesful entrepreneur one should cultivate an attitude of writing down the learnings in one word in one minute.". I hope this book is a great guide for everyone dreaming to be an entrepreneur.

Cross Browser Compatibility

A recent report in the internet indicated the decline in number of Microsoft internet explorer user’s base. The percentage of IE users declined to 68% from 74% in the 6 months time period. Meanwhile Mozilla’s firefox saw an increase in usage to 24% from 17%.

The decline in IE usage is attributed to several factors including the increase in the sales of Apple MAC using Safari, increase usage of Googles Chrome and open source Mozilla’s FireFox.

The application developments should be more focused to support Cross-browsers.

jQuery - The cool stuff

The introduction of jQuery and its support in Microsoft's visual studio gonna revolutionize the programmer world with its easy to use interface, built-in features to support cross-browser issues, CSS3 compliance etc., I realized the meaning of "The write less, Do More" after playing around with the jquery package :) . watch for More posts on this cool stuff - !!!!