Rajneesh's Logbook

The idea behind the concept of Web Apps is quite simple and interesting - to allow to create apps without bothering to learn the mobile platform specific SDKs (iOS or Android usually).  A mobile platform provides two ways to access applications - native apps and web apps. A native app can get at the special hardware in Android/iOS, uses the SDK and it can be sold in the app store. A web app, on the other hand, can't use the hardware, can't be sold in the app store but it is much easier to create. The main focus of this book is to customize your website/apps to look good on an Android powered device. So, basically, you create the customized versions of the applications/websites for mobile from your knowledge  of basic page creation technologies i.e. HTML, CSS and Javascript.  This book also shows the use of these along with jQuery and WebKit browser. There is an intrdouction to HTML5 (Local Storage and WebSQL database). 2 chapters are devoted to understanding and wor...

Google today released a new browser based tool that will make learning and testing code for Google's Javascript APIs a lot easier. Google's AJAX API Playground gives developers an easy to use interface to write some basic Javascript code for Google's eight Javascript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries, and Earth). The programming console provides sample starter applications for all APIs but you are free to change the source code and save the modified version to your own Google Account for referencing later. The Playground runs on top of Google's App Engine and was developed as a '20% project'. It will also be Google's official way to show Javascript samples. For anyone interested in exploring various Google APIs, I am sure this could be a great way to get some coding experience. Link: Google AJAX API Playground

From http://www.whenpenguinsattack.com/2007/08/20/5-ways-to-speedup-javascript/ 1) use a compressor JSMin is a filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files. It typically reduces filesize by half, resulting in faster downloads. It also encourages a more expressive programming style because it eliminates the download cost of clean, literate self-documentation. 2) Minimize the number of .js files Each .js file reference on a web page means another http request from a client's browser. Although it may decrease the readability/maintainability of your code, it is faster to have one larger .js file than multiple smaller ones. 3) use profiler and timer tools Firebug offers a suite of profiler and timing tools that allows you to see exactly how long your scripts take to execute and gives you the ability to tweak and optimize them. 4) asynchronize your code Browsers run Javascript code synchronously. This means that when a <script></script> tag h...

Dojo is an Open Source JavaScript UI toolkit. It makes writing JavaScript easier, building great interfaces faster, and deploying dynamic UIs at scale much easier. The foundation of Dojo is "Dojo Base", a single tiny library which contains Ajax, event handling, effects, blazing fast CSS queries, language utilities, and a lot more. On top of this Base, the rest of Dojo Core adds high-quality facilities for Drag and Drop, extended forms of Ajax and I/O, JSON-RPC, internationalization, and back-button handling. Layered on Dojo Core is a widget system, Dijit, which makes developing and reusing interface components a snap. If you can write HTML and CSS, Dijit allows you to quickly build reusable client-side components. Similarly, Dojo can use extended attributes on HTML in order to declare where widgets should be placed and how to configure them. Placing a graphical date picker in a page is as easy as adding an attribute to an <input> element. By upgrading standard HTML inst...

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a rich set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript. It is used for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. The YUI Library components fall into three groups: Utilities, UI Controls, and CSS resources. YUI Utilities The YUI Utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. Various utilities are: Event Dom Collection Connection Manager Drag & Drop Animation YUI Controls The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh. YUI Controls include: AutoComplete Container DataTable Control Logger TabView TreeView Slider Calendar YUI CSS Resources CSS Grids CSS Fonts CSS Reset YUI Lib...