...more recent posts
Work has been busy, so I'm years behind on posting. Maybe later today I can try to catch up a bit. One of the many topics I want to hit is jquery which is a javascript library that helps with creating both javascript effects in the page (animations, fancy slide in/out menus, accordians, tabs, lightboxes, etc...) as well as facilitating AJAX (well, AJAX-y since it's not necessarily XML) requests to the server. I used to talk about EXTjs a lot when I was first learning about these libraries, but I've ended up settling on jquery for my uses. They aren't exactly the same, but they are very similar, and jquery just feels better to me. In any case, these libraries (jquery, EXTjs, MooTools, Prototype/Scriptilicious, etc...) are at the heart of most new sites on the web (so called Web2.0.) and as a developer all I can say is Hallelujah because they take away 90% of the pain in developing for so many different browsers (I'm looking at you IE6!)
But it is a bit of a learning curve since I used to think of javascript as something to be avoided along the lines of Flash. Everything changes though, and so this is now something you just have to know to be current.
This morning I really struggled with an issue involving submitting accented characters in data through a jquery $.post statement. Turns out, unlike when submitting a form the old fashion way, when jquery serializes the post values it always uses url-encoded UTF-8 strings. So on the server side you need to do a UTF8_decode on the data before you stick it in the database. Luckily this post got me the answer without too much trouble since that is one of those little things that you could waste a whole day trying to figure out.