Joe Lanman

I’m a big fan of applications that do a simple thing well; jsFiddle.net is an innovative environment to work on HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the browser. Coded by Piotr Zalewa and designed by Oskar Krawczyk, it’s a tool I’ve found really useful for me and my team – the simple four-pane layout is brilliantly suited to front-end development:
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There are two out-of-the-box methods for multiple selection in HTML: checkboxes and the <select> tag. Neither are perfect – I’ll be discussing why, and proposing a sort of mashup of the best aspects of both, using jQuery.

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The Python language has useful string methods to search for prefixes and suffixes:

my_string.startswith('pre')

The same thing can be achieved in Javascript using the rather powerful search and replace methods.

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Right – thought I’d post some actual code as proof of actual development.

I wrote the first version of my CMS back-end in PHP, and sent data to a Javascript front-end using JSON. This was fantastically fast and simple – the string only need be checked for dangerous syntax, and then eval-ed and it becomes Javascript objects ready to use. The pot-noodle of data formats.

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