Fresh on the heels of my failure with Knockout, I continued my OOP and data-bound JavaScript development. I also discovered Angular.js this week (by Google). This looks like it’s a much cleaner and easier (read: less clunky) way of doing what Knockout.js does. It also looks like this might be pretty easy for me to implement into my existing project. Also, from a staying power perspective, it’s probably safe to assume since Google is officially backing (and created) that it will be around for a while.
I also started playing around with Responsive Design, creating a new website that will attempt to feature a fully responsive design and layout. I discovered that HTML5 does not work well (read: at all) in older browsers (IE) – but there’s an easy fix using html5shiv. This effectively makes unrecognized HTML tags recognizable in older browsers (IE). (It uses JavaScript document.createElement(‘article’) which then allows the browser to recognize the tag – for some reason)
Discovered html5 pushstate as well as jQuery BBQ – both of which support browser urls, history (back button) and direct linking to interactive HTML web apps (that don’t actually have real urls).
Also found the Twitter Bootstrap project (which was mentioned in the Angular tutorial videos). Pretty cool – just a basic HTML/CSS foundation for a new website. Obviously you’ll need to wrap your own design, but it makes a great starting point and has a lot of the small stuff already taken care of!
Used a iisRewrite mod to force WWW into the URL for a site even if the visitor arrives without the www. prefix. Was pretty simple using a rewrite Wizard to generate the web.config code block – and making sure the mod was installed on IIS (thanks IT dept!).
Dug deep with jQuery UI AutoComplete – specifically all of the events (select, search, etc) and dynamically displaying a spinner in the text field during 3rd party API call on the autocomplete.