Naneau

The life of a programmer has become easier and easier over the years. High level programming languages, decent development environments and good manuals all help. With the rise of the internet, sharing knowledge has become a lot easier. And because of that, people now share solutions to common problems.

Before I started this blog, a few weeks ago now, I thought about putting together some fun things from which I could learn. I thought that if I could build things that I could explain to readers, I would learn even more. The most striking thing I have found, however, is the ease with which you can build certain things now. Using the Zend Framework as a server side back end, and JavaScript libraries for the client makes coding for the web a lot of fun.

I have so far put together 3 examples for this blog. And none of them took me more than a few hours. The stocks example was done in about 15 minutes. All I had to do was grab an existing class of the internet, update it a little and pass it’s results to a template. Just to make it more Web 2.0, I wrote a very small JavaScript function that reloads the table every 10 seconds, which is made very easy by Prototype’s Ajax functions.

For updating graphs I had to put in a little more effort. This was largely because I was completely unfamiliar with PlotKit, and I’m really not that much of a JavaScript coder (which you can probably see in my code). But after I had the class ready, working with it was a breeze. The Zend JSON class is very handy, so it’s controller actions can be under 10 lines of code. That’s amazing, considering the usefulness and beauty of the result.

The thing I am most proud of however, is the paging grid I made to showcase gluing client side frameworks to server side ones. I just took an example of the ExtJS website, played around with it for an hour or so, and wrote some PHP to provide it with data. Because I’m no JavaScript guru, it took me a bit of time, but still it was relatively easy to pull of.