Mountain Climbing Trip: Sawteeth

This past weekend, I went out to the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, Keene Valley, NY. I have always enjoyed this area, but haven't been out there much since my surgery; especially in the winter. Below are just a couple of samples of the awesome views (and weather) we had. If you are a Facebook friend, you can check out the rest there.

Cool Visual Effect: CSS & PNG

Check out this cool background effect. Also used on this blog, just scroll down.
http://www.fivefingercoding.com/xhtml-and-css/scrolling-transparent-background-effect
Sweet, right?!

40 Useful JS tools: Smashing Magazine

To add to yesterday's post, check these out.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/02/40-stand-alone-javascript-libraries-for-specific-purposes/ 

JavaScript Frameworks: Which one???

In today's web development world, there are a plethora of tools/frameworks out there to take advantage of. Since JavaScript has revived itself and become deeply embedded into today's killer web apps, I thought I would take a minute to list and discuss a few popular JS frameworks, and their differences.

• Prototype (http://www.prototypejs.org) - Offers an very extensible library for creating your own JS objects/classes, as well as using a sweet list of functions for Ajax, DOM, JSON, Arrays etc... It is the basis for other frameworks, such as Script.aculo.us and ModalBox.
• MooTools (http://mootools.net) - A lightweight, selective library which accomplishes much of what the Prototype library gives you. Advantage, smaller library size, since you can pick and choose your components.
• Jquery (http://jquery.com) - Similar to the others, but well noted for its DOM and event modification. Jquery is also probably the most widely used library with clients like Dell, Google, Mozilla, etc... It is also sanctioned as Microsoft's platform for ASP.net Ajax and the MVC.

Some frameworks will support use with another, but not all. Tread lightly.

As you can see, all offer similar functionality, but your choice will most likely depend on the type of project you are attacking. I have had to use all three, depending on the client, technology, and existing platforms; so if you already haven't familiarize yourself with what is out there!

SubSonic and REST

I have been using SubSonic as a data access layer for a couple of years now to take the mundane work out of writing and updating SQL. SubSonic also offers a simple, but powerful REST interface for exposing data to the world for consumption by Ajax and other web technologies. Recently, I couldn't find a complete list of prefix/suffix operators for querying against a REST data set, so I dug into the SubSonic source code and found these. Below is an example REST url; with a list of prefix/suffixes that can be used to query your data:

Ex 1 - Lists all the records in our Directory table
http://whit-webman.ad.syr.edu/REST/directory/list.xml

Ex 2 - ID's that are greater than 100 (using prefix/suffixes)
http://whit-webman.ad.syr.edu/REST/directory/list.xml?min_facultyid=100

Ex 3 - Filter by Last Name (straight-up field query)
http://whit-webman.ad.syr.edu/REST/directory/list.xml?lastname=daley

Now, here is the list of prefix/suffix parameters for your REST url query.

min_: > (greater than)
minz_: >= (greater than or equal to)
max_: < (less than)
maxz_: <= (less than or equal to)
_not: Is Not
_notequal: Not Equals
_is: Is
_like: LIKE
_notlike: NOT LIKE

Hopefully you can see the power in this. Just as a note, you don't have to use xml as a return type, you can also use JSON or RSS if your web server is configured for it.