dojox.gfx documentation

I almost laughed out loud when I finally found the documentation for dojox.gfx
Thats because it's taken me so long to find! So for anyone else who is looking for it here is is:

dojox.gfx 1.1

reCaptcha

I'm sticking a CAPTCHA into my sign up form. If your not familiar with CAPTCHA's they're used to try and prevent bots from abusing your web form. I'm using one I think is particularly handy is called reCaptcha.

It looks like this:


Pretty neat huh?

Dojo exploration

Wow, I underestimated the amount of tweaking I'd need to do to get some simple form validation working with dojo dijit. To be fair to dojo dijit it's not entirely because of the libraries implementation. I am not using dojo's recommended method of adding invalid html element attributes. I am adding dijit widgets with just javascript and this way is less well documented.

Stumbling through the implementation I found some handy documentation for anyone else attempting to use dojo.

http://dojocampus.org/explorer/

Dojo Dijit Form Validation

I thought form validation would be straight forward enough in dojo 1. It's not if your trying to avoid invalid markup. Form validation in dojo is indeed interesting. Some strange interaction has been developed for dijit.

I've wasted plenty of time this afternoon getting form validation onto a simple contact form. 2 input elements of type text and one textarea element. Nothing too crazy. Unfortunately there isn't any out of the box validation for textarea that I can see. All I need here is a validation rule of "textarea must not be empty". Nope nothing out of the box here.

Text input elements are the big surprise. The way it validates is when you change focus the inputs visual state changes. The input element gets a new colour and an icon. You then need to click on the input (give focus back to the input) and you will get a tooltip message giving the user feedback about what specifically is wrong with the current input.

I'm going to leave this validation on my project just because I think it's interesting and I've already invested the time getting this to work without invalid markup. I'll update this post with a link to the form once it's live.

Stretchy transparent boxes and other front end stuff

Got wireframes?

I'm into the project build. Yep I do have wireframes so I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm trying to do. Which is really good because it helps you get on with building rather than thinking about what needs to be on the page.

Now I'm designing front end presentation behavior and straight away I build a box with rounded corners (I don't mind them, even if its getting very very old now). Ok ok thats cool... hmmm, this box will be in a few places and it'll be different widths.... its got a graphical border... hmmm. How do I get this box to stretch? 

I was flipping through Andy Budds CSS Mastery book which referred me to this technique:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200505/transparent_custom_corners_and_borders/

If you want round corners on your boxes its a great technique, read through the links as there has been a few updates to it.

PERL?

Ok so I've decided to put my project on Godaddy for now. Godaddy allows the exec() php function to access the command line for a limited set of commands. Specifically imagemagick's convert command so huzza I should be able to convert svg to png or jpeg!

Along with this hosting service comes the availability of PERL. I've never built anything in PERL and I think that considering Imagemagick works well with PERL this may be a interesting segway. 

Webhosting

Having tonnes of fun posting on forums of free web hosts asking please explain questions about claims of supported features this week.

There are plenty of free webhosts with php. I haven't found a free web host that I feel comfortable uploading anything onto that supports ImageMagick.

I will need an image manipulation application if I am going to be able to convert SVG to PNG.

Anyway, I've been looking at www.000webhost.com and for the most part I'm impressed at this free web host. I created an account because the features page listed Image magic. Well for now its lie. They don't have image magick installed on their servers, they may do soon but not at the moment.

Project Update

Last week I posted my project plan here: http://students.mim.iml.uts.edu.au/users/10685028/SystemPlan/SystemPlan.html

However I've recently installed Wordpress on my personal web server and I think it is much more straight forward than blogger. My project plan will need an update soon with more wire frames and a new system architecture diagram.

As we start to approach the read zone some of the feature creep in design may become feature cull :P

Development however is forging ahead, my dev environment is possibly complete with php, mysql, apache2, & wordpress. Of course there are multiple JavaScript libraries and I'm also considering using server side include shtml files to speed things up