jtinsky

I’m well on my way and every day that I use jQuery I find something else that keeps me coming back for more. Last night and tonight I wired up some simple AJAX functionality using the keyup function and the load function and a bit of PHP.

This stuff is SO useful and well worth the learning curve. The ability to make your site infinitely more usable is worth every second of your time.

I feel like I’m at the same place I was when I decided to pass on Ruby on Rails and choose Python and Django. The entire learning process and potential expense of buying flex builder seem pretty off-putting. Especially when the potential options (processing and OpenLazslo) seem so compelling.

The project manager and sales turd in me says the way to approach this decision is to look at the project requirements and use that to determine what platform to use.

Here, in a nutshell, are my requirements:
1) I need to create boxes which contain text and are linked to other boxes.
2) The number of boxes, the text in them and their relationship to other boxes needs to be stored in a database.
3) Auto completion of the text in the boxes needs to be possible.
4) Connecting one box to another sequentially is a requirement as is the the ability to cut a box from one ‘branch’ and paste it to another while maintaining the text.
5) ALL major browsers need to be supported. This is an ‘enterprise’ application which, translated’ means it needs to work on 5-7 year old operating systems and browsers. IE needs to ‘be my friend’.
6) The ‘application’ needs to work in a browser or as a desktop application. If you’re part of the same group you get access to the text in the boxes of others in your group. Or if you pay a subscription fee you have access to some of the content of these boxes.

My impressions are that Flex offers all of these things but with a steep learning curve and a metric buttload of faith based programming where Adobe is my lord and savior.

Having done the “closed source” thang for a while I’m more than a tad averse to hitching entrepreneurial my wagon to a glacial corporate entity like Adobe.

As I type, I’m leaning toward Flex because OpenLaszlo, processing, etc. all appear to meet some but not all of my requirements.

So sell my soul it is. Stay tuned…

I’ve been practicing GVIM by using it every day at work but I’m far from perfect. This reminds me of learning to surf. It was SO frustrating. I knew eventually it’d be fun but the learning curve was long and steep.

I truly admire people who are fluent in VIM. Jealous even…

There are tons of options and just figuring out how to set them and then how to make them persist is a challenge. I’m getting there though and my work is only about 5 times slower then when I do it in TextPad – a huge improvement from the 20 times slower of early last week.