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Blogs » Archive for November, 2006

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jQuery Contest: Whip up a Button

by Alex Walker

We admit it. We dig jQuery (that’s old skool dig — not in a web 2.0 way).

Sure, Prototype, MochiKit and MooFX have their minions, but for its slim lines, its power and its simple but elegant syntax, jQuery is where it’s at for us.

If you are yet to encounter the benefits of jQuery, check the growing list of tutorials and demos available on the site.

However, if you’re already a convert and simply want to help, jQuery creator John Resig has set a contest with fabulous prizes and everlasting glory to the lucky winner. Simply design the best ‘Powered by jQuery button as judged by the jQuery general community.

There aren’t many restrictions. It should be a maximum size of 173px x 31px, it should include the jQuery hat device and entries close on November 3rd.

I’ve already submitted my entry but I must admit it’s hard go past any design that blends JavaScript and Devo.

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 | Posted in Web Design | 5 Comments »

The next hot PHP app you install might be IBM’s

by Harry Fuecks

In case you hadn’t paid any attention to QEDWiki so far, check out this demo. The server-side is written in PHP using Zend’s framework - more detail here and most recent info seems to be here (it’s not released yet - some time soon)

The idea of application wikis and situational applications has a lot of potential IMO. If you consider Dokuwiki (tends to get mentioned round here) for example, its interesting that a number of users have employed it as an alternative to a CMS - it gives you more structure than most wiki’s thanks to things like namespaces but is far more flexible than your average CMS.

More interesting is examining some of the behavior syntax plugins such as the sql plugin;

===== A wiki page with a query =====

Here is the //products// list:

<sql db="mysql://user:pwd@localhost/shop"> select * from products; </sql>

Or the AJAX chat plugin which just needs you to add ~~CHAT~~ to any page.

There’s potential here. Dokuwiki has design limitations, such as it’s difficult to apply access control sections of a page and I doubt that’s easy to fix without a big re-write: that SQL plugin is really only for private wikis.

But …

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 | Posted in PHP | 4 Comments »

Who Be Me Sql Server User in This Configuration?

by Wyatt Barnett

One of the poorly documented, yet quite important, facts of life in dealing with .NET applications is that one is often using Windows Authentication to communicate with Sql Server databases. Unfortunately, exactly which identity one is using by default is poorly documented at best. So I made you this handy table for reference:

Windows Version
Web Server
Default Windows Context

Any
Cassini (VS.NET 2005 builtin web server)
Interactive User’s Context*

2000 (Pro or Server)
IIS
ASPNET

XP
IIS
ASPNET

2003 Server
IIS
NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE**

Notes:
*: This means you, the developer’s context. Which usually translates to a member of the Administrator’s group, meaning your application is running with full database permissions. Meaning it is a bad testing situation because the web app should never, ever have those …

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 | Posted in .NET | 1 Comment »

News Wire: IE 7: Were they ready?

by Kevin Yank

• The Impending Ruby Fracture
  Development of the official Ruby VM is proving to be slow and buggy, while three new competitors (JRuby, Ruby.NET, and Rubeneus) are gaining ground. With no official roadmap, will competing interests lead to fragmentation of the language?
  (tags: rubyonrails programming)
• An Introduction to Groovy and Grails
  A nice and easy introduction to Groovy, an open source scripting language written specifically for the Java platform, and Grails, a web application framework similar to Rails but written for the Groovy language.
  (tags: java opensource)
• Actual Browser Sizes (final)
  A report on the actual browser window sizes (not screen sizes) and other statistics taken from three fashion sites and a web development blog.
  (tags: design)
• Zope 3 in 30 Minutes
  From the official Zope 3 wiki, this article is an excellent getting started guide to Zope 3, the latest incarnation of the original web development framework for Python.
  (tags: python)
• When to use tables for layout
  Certainly controversial, this article nevertheless makes some good points about the limitations of current CSS support in browsers, and how we choose to get around them. Is misusing tables for layout necessarily worse than misusing CSS to produce …

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 | Posted in Industry Links | 2 Comments »