Web Info & Tutorials

Ever wanted to create your own isometric pixel picture, but didn’t know what the word isometric meant? Well, now you can fulfil your wildest dreams with Cubescape!

That is the headline for Cubescape, a site that released a new jQuery based front end that lets you drop the cubes!

Perfect for a Friday, go ahead and get dropping on this very clean interface.

Just when you thought that datepickers had been played out, along comes Filament Group and puts a whole new spin on it. Working from Mark Grabanski’s jQuery UI DatePicker control, the team substantially enhanced the UI with a host of new features including:

• shortcut links to preset date ranges, for example, “Past 30 days” or “Current YTD,”
• links to “All dates before…” and “All dates after…” to simplify selecting a range of values where the data set is very large or the high or low end value is an unknown, and
• only showing the number of calendars needed for choosing a particular range (i.e., you only need one calendar to choose “All dates before…”, but you’ll need two to select a custom range).
• Use of progressive enhancement for graceful degradation /li>

Check out the demo here.

"All the chips seem to be stacked against the U.S. consumer. I don't think the consumer can hold up."

In Canada, the Bank of Montreal keeps publicly chastising the media for its negative headlines, and is sending out lists of reasons to be optimistic. via Globeinvestor.com

Spring Web Flow 2.0 has been released which includes a new Spring JavaScript module.

Here is an example of an onclick wrapper calling an Ajax event:

I got to sit down with Keith Donald and Jeremy Grelle from SpringSource and talk to them about the going-ons on the Web tier. There are a couple of moving parts, from the core Web framework (Spring MVC), to the Spring Webflow controller engine, to the new Spring JS module.

Spring JS abstracts on top of other JavaScript libraries (this release supports Dojo, but more can come), and aims to make certain tasks very easy to do. Jeremy talks about some of the use cases, such as form validation. The library could be used stand alone, but of course there is nice integration with the server side Spring frameworks too. This allows you to annotate in Java, and get nice Ajax behaviour on the client.