Web Design – AzureDays

Object JavaScript – Building Stateful jQuery UI Plugin Using Widget Factory

February 25, 2015

In this post, you will learn step-by-step to build your own custom, reusable, testable jQuery UI widget.

You will extend the jQuery library with custom UI code and then use it on a page. The initial plug-in will be trivial to demonstrate the jQuery Widget Factory pattern. You will provide properties that you can change to change the look of your widget and you will provide some methods that will respond to user input.

In this post example, you will learn how to create a simple click counter. Click a button, increase the count. The idea is to show you the steps to create a jQuery UI Widget.

The Widget Factory system manages state, allows multiple functions to be exposed via a single plugin, and provides various extension points.

Continue reading “Object JavaScript – Building Stateful jQuery UI Plugin Using Widget Factory”

Object JavaScript – Building a Reusable Stateless jQuery Plugin

February 23, 2015

In this post, you will learn step-by-step to build your own custom, reusable, testable jQuery Plugin.

There are times where you will want to reuse code that performs a series of operations on a selection.

For example, you may want to embed information a span element and then have that information displayed in a references section near the end of the document. In this case, the jQuery plugin is stateless.

In the next post, Building Stateful jQuery UI Plugin Using Widget Factory, you will see how to create a stateful jQuery plugin using jQuery Widget. And you will see how the widget is a better solution for plugins that require user interaction, because the Widget factory helps you maintain state.

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Snippet – Using FontAwesome, Bootstrap, MVC for Checkbox, Radio Controls

July 17, 2014

So how can you use the check-boxes from Font Awesome, and get the box to check/uncheck. When a user clicks, how do I show the right icon?

When checked: icon-check ; unchecked: icon-check-empty.

The basic idea is to select spans:before that is next to input you want..

If you are using less/sass, you could just include the .icon-glass:before declarations, to make it all easier to maintain & modify. Continue reading “Snippet – Using FontAwesome, Bootstrap, MVC for Checkbox, Radio Controls”

Single Page App – isLoading jQuery Plugin to Indicate Content Loads

July 12, 2014

When you’re loading information using jQuery AJAX, you may want to provide visual feedback when loading data or for any action that would take time.

In this Snippet, you will learn how to:

Load JSON data from a getJSON call to our server.
Show and hide a spinning indicator inside a div.
Bind the incoming data to a view model object.
Use the view model to populate an external template.

Then once the page is loaded, it will display the data based on an external template.

And we’ll provide some tips on how you you can use the IsLoading library to display the loading indicator on top of the page while loading and on top of the div itself.

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Single Page Apps – Notes on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

July 9, 2014

One of my readers has mentioned that there are issues regarding search engine optimization (SEO) for single page apps. Because content is dynamically loaded via JavaScript calls rather than as part of the initial page load, search engine crawlers won’t see all the content.

Let me explain.

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Snippet — Custom Fonts Fix

June 4, 2014

Font embedding enables fonts used in the creation of a document to travel with that document, which ensures that a user views the document exactly as the author intended.

Modern browsers support the W3C standard for custom fonts, WOFF, at http://caniuse.com/#search=wof. WOFF is compressed TrueType/OpenType font that contains information about the font’s source. You can learn more about these at CSS3 Tutorial – Custom Fonts.

But what about earlier browsers?

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Object JavaScript – Introduction to Templates in MVVM Using Knockout.js, Mustache

April 29, 2014

You can use template feature in Knockoutjs to render your data. Templates are a straight forward way to build complex UI structure, often with repeating or nested blocks. You can use templates to show repeating data, such as data in tables or portfolios.

From the point of view of Object JavaScript, templates help you further separate out the code that gets and sets the data, from the code that renders the data. Templates provide you a way to reuse similar views throughout your application. And they help you isolate the view that deals with data in a way that you can find and understand in your own code.

Templates as they are used in this post, are reusable chunks of HTML that relate to your observables in Knockout.

There are two main ways of using templates:

Native templating where you use foreach, if, with and other control bindings. The control flow bindings use the HTML markup in your element and render against your data. The feature is built into Knockout.
String-based templating connects Knockout to third-party template engine, such as jQuery Templates, MustacheJS, or underscore.

In this post, you will learn the basics of using templates in your HTML application using JavaScript.

Continue reading “Object JavaScript – Introduction to Templates in MVVM Using Knockout.js, Mustache”

Object JavaScript – Dynamic UI Using Observables with MVVM Using Knockout.js

April 25, 2014

In our previous posts, you learned how to build modules. In the next series of posts, you will learn how you can connect up modules to the user interface. You will learn, step by step how to use observables for your user interface to dynamically update itself.

Knockout.js makes it easier to create rich, responsive UIs with JavaScript. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), KO can help you implement it more simply and maintainable.

Knockout helps you build rich client-side interactivity by using an MVVM-like (Model, View, and ViewModel) pattern. It does this by helping you separate the UI behavior and the data structures. To do this, you will use declarative bindings with observable data.

Knockout is free, open source, and available for your projects using the MIT License.

Knockout helps you:

Synchronize JSON models with HTML elements using Observable Properties.
Synchronize arrays, using Observable Arrays.
Provide calculated properties using Computed Properties.

Continue reading “Object JavaScript – Dynamic UI Using Observables with MVVM Using Knockout.js”

HTML5 Tutorial – Captioning video tracks

March 14, 2014

The <track> element represents a timed text file to provide users with multiple languages or commentary for videos. You can use multiple tracks and set one as default to be used when the video starts.

You can provide a transcript of the video.

This article introduces how can use WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) and Media Multiple Text Tracks API as part of your video.

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HTML5 Tutorial – Custom Controls for Multimedia

March 12, 2014

When you display video in HTML5, you have may want to display a set of controls to the user. The HTML5 video tag has a control attribute that lets you display the controls that come with the browser.

But you may want to build custom controls using its media API, and the media events. Play, pause, and seek in the entire video, change the volume, mute, change the playback rate (including going into negative values).

This post shows how you can build a custom media player using different the media API attributes, events, and methods.

Continue reading “HTML5 Tutorial – Custom Controls for Multimedia”