Constatus - Find those Strings and Const'em!

Whud'up?

Not so long ago I've opened a random file on the code base I'm working with and saw the horror of many Strings values which have "why am I not a constant?!" written all over them.
I figured that a re-factor is in order but I wondered how will I know that if covered all the instances of a particular String value?

Good thing there is NodeJS around and some nice modules like Esprima, which can help with that, and so I found myself coding this little harmless tool which does the following:
Goes over the code and finds Strings which, according to configuration, should be made constants.

Deadly simple and dare I say dumb as it gets, but guys - it does the work, so why not put it on Github? ;)
So feel free to visit the project on Github with the mind-blowing name: Constatus
It is not complete, there are many more features that can be added, but it's out there for you to abuse ;)

Take care

New Quake-Stats improvments

Yeah, I know - it has been a while since I wrote but trust me, I had important things to attend to, and still do BTW ;) don't worry, it has nothing to do with work, code or debugging shit.
Anyhow - I just wanted to let you know that the "quake-stats" open source application has gained some nice new features!
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you can read about it here and of course visit the Git Hub repo.

So, we got MongoDB into the stack and so we can save games across time. Hold your horses, this doesn't mean that we have over-time game statistics but it means that we're on the way going there.
If you want to upload games files into the application there is an "easter egg" for you. Just go the to "/admin" route and before you will reveal itself a nice upload screen (well, not so nice but it does the work). Once uploaded, the game will be stored on your MongoDB and later can be accessed easily via the "Game" dropdown menu. This great feature is a contribution of Haim Litvak. Cheers mate!

I also added another feature to enable Quake scores over maps per a single player. This feature will display the score Quake calculates for each map and display it on the "player" screen under the "Kill, Deaths & Q-Score" chart.

That's it so far. If you think something is missing, fork it and do it yourself :)

Cheers

My Sublime Text plugins

Yo.

I am pretty sure that many of you are familiar or even using Sublime Text.
If you don't you should definitely check it out and consider it being your main text/code editor.
One of it's key features is the plugins you can add to it, and so you can find numerous plugins which helps your coding process so much. I would like to share with you the very limited, yet so useful, set of plugins I use:

AngularJS
Something to help you code Angular better. Aside from code-completion it also offers a cool "goto definition" which helps greatly within AngularJS. Not to die for, but does makes things easier.

Brackets Highlighter
The name says it all. You want to know where you brackets start and end, surely if you're a web developer. This plugin hands it to you so you can stop looking for that missing bracket.

Git
Runs the basic Git operations from within Sublime Text. I'm not using this excursively since I prefer Git bash for these sort of things, but adding files, diffs and blame are darn easy and clearer with this plugin.

Git Gutter
You want to see your changes directly on the code (ok ok, on the code pane gutter). This plugin will let you do that. love it.

That's it.
Told you, I don't stack plugins just for the sake of having them. These 4 are the ones I use frequently and they are reliable.

I would love to hear any other plugins suggestions you might have that can make the work of a web developer much easier with Sublime Text.

… and BTW -
I don't know how many of you remember one of the brilliant Flash talents of all times - Mr. Grant Skinner. Anyhow, he has migrated to HTML5 development since and recently I've bumped into his RegExp tool for JS. I loved the previous version of that tool for ActionScript and this one is even better. A keeper.
Check it out - regexr

CrunchBang rocks #!

I'm not a Linux power-user. Correction, I'm not Linux user.

Seriously, I spent a lot of time laughing at those Linux fanatics, and still do. It always seemed to me that the more one likes Linux the more s/he has bad social skills.
But one thing has to said - Linux is a better OS for developers, period. If you're building stuff, if your'e contributing code to open source projects, if you like your shell to be efficient - it's Linux, mate.

So I found myself knocking on Ubuntu's doors and working for a fairly long time on it, struggling with it the way only a Win-OS user can.
Yet, something really bothered me with Ubuntu. The way it tried to be user friendly and in that course fucked up the UX or the way it offered me so many advanced features which I didn't want or cared about.

I have an old Toshiba Tecra laptop. It served me through thick and thin, suffered my abuses and even overcame some nicely done floor-crashes. I call it "the gimp", and my "gimp" had 2 OS's installed on it when I decided that it is time to wipe it clean and install a single one which can perform nicely.
Ubuntu was obviously the first choice, but then I can across a nice resource which presented a new linux debian distribution called "CrunchBang", or as the natives call it "#!".
After little exploration I came to know that it was a very light-weight OS, which works nicely on old machines - I had to give it a go.

The installation went briefly and in a matter of minutes I had it in front of me.
The interface minimalism is what got me first. No more task-bars and shit, just a blank desktop with the system monitors on and a set of keyboard shortcuts. beautiful.
Everything went faster, from opening the web browser to utilizing git on the shell - if it was a comics strip, I would add "SWOOSH!" to every operation I've made. And guys, I'm talking about and old machine with 3G of RAM and 2 Cores CPU. Insulting shit in today's terms.
I also have to mention that Ubuntu didn't approve my 2 monitors settings, which kinda sealed it's fate for me. What? install a plugin for that? yeah, right...

Of course I had to tweak the OS (yet) again, installing JAVA 1.7 (com'on, why does it have to be so annoying?!), installing languages and stuff, you know. But once I've done doing that, I was faced with a swift OS. simple as that. The "start" menu accessibility, the way OpenBox works for this OS, Sublime Text flying like an eagle over it... just sweet.
Imagine how it would perform on a new machine...

So if you're looking for a cool Linux distribution for your old machine, or just a cleaner OS which performs like a devil on the 7th pit of hell - I recommend you give this one a go.

… and BTW -
I caught this very inspiring deck of slides from HubSpot describing their culture. It's interesting to see how companies are aligning themselves to fit the present time.

Printing a Dialog content using Canvas and iFrame

Hi guys,
You know that printing from the browser is a bitch. Even after you've figured out how to put the content you want into the browser, the printing doesn't always work the same on all the browsers (yes! HTML is a standard... my arse). And that's not where all the trouble stop but anyway...

The problem I would like to bring up in this post is printing from a dialog box, which is more complex since we have to somehow extract the visual data from the dialog and then put it in some way that the crippled window.print() method can make sense of it. I mean seriously, have you ever seen such a lame API? print()? that's it? no "what do you want to print?". Throw me a freaking bone here.
Given that we're dealing with a dialog kinda eliminates the possibility to use the print media query, since we're not going to alter the whole page, just a section of it.

I saw many solutions on the web, some offering to save and then clean up the DOM, attach a cloned version of the DOM you actually want to print, and then re-render it all back after printing, which to me sounds like "bla bla bla bad performance sad users bla bla bla".
You know, all kinds of adding classes to elements, removing it then later... oh god.
Of course there is the jQuery plugin which offers to do that but I wasn't in the mode to introduce yet another jQuery pluging so I had to think of something else...

Canvas came to the rescue.
The idea I came up with is to somehow capture the DOM content I wanted to print, convert it into an image, and then create a hidden iFrame bearing the content of this image among other stuff I wanted to be printed. How? canvas can be concerted into an image.
I already had html2canvas library so it wasn't in a need to download any other 3rd party. you can get what it does from it's name, right? good.

Moving forward, here's the actions the code needed to perform (pseudo-code):

• Get the canvas from the HTML elements
• Convert the canvas to an image using the toDataURL('image/png') method
• Create an iFrame dynamically
• Append the iFrame to the DOM 
• Once loaded Set the iframe content with the newly generated image I have
• Send it to printing, by printing the iFrame content only
• Smoke a cigarette

I believe that what's written above should give a good idea on how to implement it.
As for printing the iFrame itself I took a code snippet from some stackoverflow thread but I had to tweak it a bit since Firefox didn't like what I did, for it removed the iFrame before the browser launched it's printing. To overcome this I've used a deferred object, like so:

this.printIframe = function (id) {
var deferred = $q.defer(),
    iframe = $window.frames ? $window.frames[id] : $window.getElementById(id),
    ifWin = iframe.contentWindow || iframe;
ifWin.focus();
ifWin.print();
deferred.resolve('done');
return deferred.promise;
};

and this means that I had to listen to the promise in order to remove the iframe from the DOM and not just count on the fact the window.print() is supposed to stop javascript execution...

I think that pretty much sums it up. It might not be the best idea out there so I would love to hear your opinion on it or better if you have a better one.

… and BTW -
I caught this nice AngularJS Weekly magazine (or whatever you would like to call it) on the way. A lot of cool resources and stuff. Pretty nice.

Stay tuned and play on.

All the JS you need

Yo guys,
You know me, I'm just strolling around the web bumping into nice stuff on the way, and recently I found a great place where you can pretty much get all the knowledge sources you need for JS.
To be honest, it's pretty amazing how much one can gather about this Egyptian-pyramids-fucking-papyrus-deserved scripting language, but then again we must, now don't we? :)

Enjoy it: superhero.js

Delegating Event handlers to align Event Data model

After such a pretentious title we can all stop and take a one week sleep. WTF do I want from you now, you probably ask. yeah, ok. check this out:

Think about this next situation - You have a nice component which potentially can host several other components, each can dispatch a different event, an event that needs to be handled of within the "parent" component.

We cannot let the "parent" component manage all the events potentially fired from its nested components, right? I mean, we can let it but then we will pretty much shit into our own development experience and maintenance, after all, we want the "parent" component to be aware of a single Event data model.

Being aware of a single event data model means that the "parent" component will expect a single format of data when receiving events from any of its nested components. It will not matter what's the data model of each nested component, something will have to align it into a single well-known model. The question is who?

We need some kind of a delegator, which will know all the potential events and will process their data and send a nice formatted data back to the "parent" component.

So, if we are to drill into more details, we're actually talking about extending the "parent" component's Scope, since it is that Scope which will eventually listen to all these events, but it will be done in a sort of a "mixin" approach.

The solution I came up with introduces a service which has a single method registering the "parent" component's scope. From there on, the service will extend the Scope and eventually send an event back to the "Parent" component with the processed event data.

Simple does it.

 

The POC can be found in Plunker

I would love to hear if you have any comments about it.

Cheers

My Unit Testing Approach to JavaScript

Hi guys,

I thought it would be nice to share with you my approach to JavaScript unit testing.
It's not really bound to any particular technology so you can embrace it if you think it can bring you some peace.

• Configure a threshold time of each test to be less than 500ms. I hate to wait on code. I need feedback now.
• I feel really bad when I need to write test for a already written code. It misses the whole purpose and usually results in bad testing. I thrive to always write tests first and code later. Close the gap you have, and start working the right way.
• Start from high-level "it"s describing what you want to test do check, so the result will be a set of empty "it" functions describing the expected functionality.
• Launch a watcher on the test files. This is crucial for having immediate feedback to whatever you're writing.
• For me, I launch the grunt serve task (Yeoman) which let's me see the application running while monitoring the tests. The Karma runs as a part of it and while keeping the autoWatch parameter as true, each save is triggering the tests. I'm always testing and seeing that the application doesn't break.
• Writing minimal code to fix the test is so important. We, developers and mostly architects, have the tendency to think far and beyond. Stop it. I'm fixing only what is required. At least I try to… ;)
• If I see that a group of tests should be bound together under some functional context, I do that by adding nested "describe"s.
• I'm always making sure that the description for the tests make sense as a real sentence which anybody can understand, even fishmongers.
• Test is first citizen code. Have JSHint/JSLint prob on your test code as well. 
• I want to see my coverage all the time. It gives me satisfactory and a warm pat on the back, but seriously now, I got to have some indication as to how good am I doing and whether I cover all the branches important to me. 

Do you have a different approach?

… and BTW -
I've bumped into this nice online tool which helps assessing 3rd party JS libraries.
Check it out at jscritic

Stay tuned.

Mocking a Confirmation Dialog in AngularJS Unit-Testing

What is more convenient then talking about the shallow gratification tests give us in the previous post, and now posting about testing examples. What can I say, you got me, I'm a child ;)

Anyhow, lets take the following case: User wishes to delete some book from his library, once he presses the delete button a confirmation dialog pops up to ask him if he is stupid or not, and once he approve that he is, the entity is being deleted.

Now, some of you may jump and shout that this is no unit! this is an automation test par excellence, but I would have to shut them up and say that yeah, this should also be tested in automation but there are unit aspects that need to be checked as well. let me explain-
You controller will probably contain 2 methods:

• confirmBookDeletion - which pops the dialog
• deleteBook - which actually deletes the book

In my unit testing I would like to cover both methods. so basically, the "deleteBook" is the easy one, where you simply expect DELETE on you $httpBackend, but the tricky one is the confirmation.

If we will break it down, the process is: display a dialog with a certain caption to it, wait for that dialog "promise" and act according to the decision (in our case "yes" invokes the deletBook method).
how do you do that? that's right, you mock it. but how?

Obviously you have some sort of a DialogService which makes your work mach easier, and on it you have a nice "confirm(msg)" method which does what take, but how exactly are you going to mock it? it's not just making sure that DialogService.confirm(msg) was called but it has to return a promise which you can later work with. It's actually pretty straight forward

First thing, let's create a MockDialogService. We do that for the sake of spying after it's confirm method:

MockDialogService = {
confirm: function(msg) {
}
};

So now you can spy on this method, but here is the nice trick - by spying on it you can define what returns when you call it, and in our case we would like to return a resolved promise with the value of "yes" (cause this is what we're testing now):

var deferred = $q.defer();
deferred.resolve('yes');
spyOn(MockDialogService, 'confirm').andReturn({result:deferred.promise});

Now that we have that we can make our expectation from it, like so:

expect(MockDialogService.confirm).toHaveBeenCalledWith('Are you out of your mind?!');

Nice. Now we need to see how this invokes the deleteBook method. so we spy on it:

spyOn(yourCtrl, 'deleteBook');

And here comes the tricky part. Since promises will be executed on the next Angular Digest cycle, we need to trigger it. We do this with scope.$apply(). After that we can expect that the deleteBook() method will be called:

scope.$apply();
expect(ctrl.deleteBook).toHaveBeenCalled();

Cheers

Understand why

So - You writing code in a TDD manner, which means that basically you're writing the tests first, waiting on them to fail, and then writing the code which makes them pass.
Damn, This makes you feel so good, right? It's like a fucking rush of satisfactory that runs through you, making you feel like you're fulfilling your roll in the world, you're executing your work to the max. You tell yourself that hey! You can do that forever. No, seriously - FOREVER.
But have you ever wondered why you feel this way?

What exactly taps into our, some-might-claim, childish emotions and pats us so warmly on the back?
Most of us feel this way and usually don't give a flying fuck about the end product, not to mention the end user of the software their creating, and this puzzles me greatly - what makes some of the smartest people I know develop such an addiction to this an immediate, shallow gratification feeling?

Let me try to ware the psychoanalyst hat for a sec and make some assumption on why a developer feels so good about a passing test and try to drilldown to find the true nature behind this behavior

Is it the quality?
Sadly I would have to say it is rarely the quality increase which makes developers so satisfied with a passing test. I saw many tests which don't check anything and pass successfully, leaving their author happy like pig-in-shit with the work he has done. In some cases developers would even knowingly cheat to make a test pass, although they will later claim that this has damaged their satisfaction since our conscience cannot be tricked that easily. Sadly The build can.
Personally I believe that the motivation for tests should come from the desire for quality. Why you desire quality? Because you want your customers to enjoy and have value from using your product.

Is it the game?
Writing software in TDD is very much like playing a self-game. It's like you're challenging yourself, much like playing Solitaire, putting targets and then trying to hit them with a stone from afar. And you have monitoring which kind of represent a leader board where you can see how much targets you did hit (coverage), which sometimes brings developer to an absurd state where their testing meaningless chunks of code like Getter/Setter just to have their coverage up.
The game does have contribution to developers satisfactory, but playing it without seeing the big picture can sometimes distract you from the real goal, that is making the end product better for the user. After all, all your code can be covered with tests and you will be top of the list, but the product doesn't sell because it is a piece of crap. Better start packing your cubical up cause your company went broke, but hey, don't forget to take the leader board with you!

Is it the mini-goals?
You know these lovely "todo" lists? Research have shown that people enjoy "checking" a task as done so much, that sometimes they register task they've already completed just to have a "check" next to it, while other tasks that really needs to be attended are left neglected. You know what I'm talking about… yes, you do.
Same with the tests. You set up small tasks to be completed, e.g. "should fetch user information" and you right away start working on it in order to put a "check" over it. You like it so much that sometime your tests become meaningless and have no benefit to the code quality or maintenance.

Is it our perfectionism?
You love to see thing done to perfection. Most of us who deal with software do (some don't and they should get fired. I mean - now). So you look at your coverage report and you eye starts to twitch for you see that you're missing 3% to your 100% code coverage. You don't mind that the code is well tested and that 3% is redundant and having them tested will not benefit the code whatsoever. You want to reach that 100%. A sheer waste of your time and build time, but damn - I just have to get this thing 100% green.

Tests are not the goal, they are the means
Yeah, let's remind ourselves once again that tests are the means in getting our goal which is a good and maintainable product releases. No seriously, you have to stop dancing around glorifying the hammer you're holding when all you have built with it is a huge pile of horseshit.
And for that matter, I strongly believe that developers should stop alienating themselves from the product. It's not only the tests which are the means but the code itself. It is your means for creation. The paint of your brash, the nail and hammer. We should concentrate on the painting. You have never seen a child showing off his color palate to his parents, right?

So why then?
Because it's easy and well defined.
If you look closely at the tasks you've recently had you'll find it that you tend to avoid those which are hard to complete or those which you have a vague idea on how to accomplish them. Tests are neither. Tests are well defined tasks which are basically easy to complete. Of course you like doing them. Hell, you're even get credits if you make a lot of them.
Why the hell won't you write them like crazy?

Conclusion
Tests are good. Write them. Responsively.
You're not a monkey. Always question the world around you and try to understand… why.

Avoiding Angular's Digest Cycles Limit Reached

Hi guys,
I've recently encountered an issue where in a certain view on an Angular application I've reached the digest cycle limit. If you got here, 80% that you've reached the same issue yourselves.
I would like to elaborate here on how I've managed to avoid it, and fix the issue. It might not work for all the variation of this problem, but it is worth trying before you go into more serious measures.

Avoid calling processing-function from the view
I’m talking about manipulating data from the view in order for it to suite the view needs, e.g. ng-repeat=”value in yourFunction(scopeMemeber)”
If you need to manipulate the data for your view, do it on the logic tier, which is the controller.
Try to use only $scope member directly on the view.

When preparing data on the controller, avoid referencing $scope members up until the very end
If you’re getting a value from some service and on the controller you’re start to “work” on it, try to avoid referencing $scope members in it, since any change to them is a potential dirty-check loop.
What you want to do is try and save the assignment to the $scope member to the very end. Manipulate you’re data using plain JS, and only in the end make the assignment to the $scope member.
Note that sometimes it would even be more efficient to copy an Object, just to make sure it is not linked to the $scope anymore…

Put Sorting, Filtering, etc. outside of the view if possible
Although Angular offers nice ways to sort, order, filtering, etc. as a part of their API on the view level, I would be much better to do that on the logic tier (controller) when the view is complex and have a lot of these.
It is sometimes more efficient to order and array and assign it to the $scope member again, than to do it on the view.

If you have more suggestion, I would be happy to hear about it :)

Cheers

Flashmatticomponents now on GitHub

Hi guys,

It took 1 email from a developer who contacted me about my old Flex/Air open source project called Flashmatticomponent, which made me finally take the time and migrate this project from Google Code to GitHub.
I don't know how many of you are still interested in the murdered-by-Adobe-and-Apple technology called Flex, but if you do, I bet you can make use of it.
I, myself, am really proud of this project ;)

You can find it here:

https://github.com/mbarzeev/flashmatticomponents

I've also copy-pasted the Wiki pages, but it didn't turned out so well, and to be honest, I can't be bothered with fixing it right now, so sorry about that.

Enjoy. 

Quake III Arena - Statistics including Flags

Hi guys,

It is a tradition for us, to drop everything and play Quake III Arena, CTF mode, on every Thursday. Now, we did have some statistics showing each players kills etc. but we never had something to show statistics for Flags. How many did one fetched, how many did he score? did he restored any? you know... what really counts when you're playing CTF.
I looked for something on the web but couldn't find anything (if you know of any solution I'll be happy to know), so I've opened the log file and went through it to see if there is anything that might help me.
Apparently the log does mention the Flags but in such manner that it is really hard to understand in what status is the flag. You can't find anything resembling "Score" or "Fetch" but rather entries where the flag has been "touched" by a player.
To make a long story sort, I came up with a simple algorithm to resolve the Flags status, and having achieved that, the rode for creating an Angular/Node/Express (using Yeoman) application was easy.
I've uploaded that application source to Github and you can find it here:

quake-stats, an open source project

Feel free to download and use, and of course, if you feel that something is missing, or you have anything to add/fix, be sure to pull-request. The code was done pretty quickly, and therefore, somewhat dirty. I know and apologize, but hey - it's an open source project, so if you see something smelly - go ahead and fix it :)

Enjoy and Frag you later ;)

Metronome Directive using the Audio API

Hi,
A few months ago a came to notice this article by Chris Wilson.
Being into Angular I thought it would be nice to create a Directive for a reusable Metronome. I'm guessing it can be useful if you're building some musical application utilizing the Audio API.
So I've publish this GIST where you can find the code for embedding this Directive in you application. You'll have to forgive me for there is still room for improvement there, but I'm sure that if you come this far it will be a walk in the park for you to modify it to you needs.

Metronome Directive Gist

BTW, if any of you knows how to make the Gist bear a name which is not derived from the files name in it, I'll be happy to know.

Cheers

AngularJS Module Seperation needs help

If you're using AngularJS as your framework of choice you probably know that it is recommended that you separate your modules according to Logic (Directives, Filters, Services) of by view type (i.e. dashboard-module) or combine the 2, but the idea is to have a single main module which depends on these "sub" modules.
This is better for testing since you don't need to load them all if you only going to test one of them, and better for keeping you stuff organized.
Currently, if you wish to create a module that, for instance, holds all the Directives, what you need to do is to have a JS file which defines the module and on top of it, it will create all the Directives with the .directive() factory method, and this is where I find the design a bit lacking, since it's really smells bad to have a big (big) file with all you're directives defined in it. no... I want each Directive to live in it's own file.
So this is where it gets uglier. If I want each Directive to be in it's own file, this means I need to load each of these files on my index.html. Now, some of you might say "Hey! use RequireJS to load them up, dummy!" but I know that RequireJS creates a whole new set of issues with the E2E tests... I really don't want RequireJS.
The direction I went with was to go with other script loaders like $script or yepnope and have them define the scripts to load on each module file - on the Directive module I will define all the directive that needs to be loaded. Doesn't work.
In the meantime, if any of you wants to share his/hers idea - I'll appreciate it :)

Cheers.

Twitter - Here I come

So whud'ya know... I'm going Twitter.
I know, I know - I have written these lines (for those of you who don't understand Hebrew, I'm bashing Twitter like hell), but I found myself more and more coming up with short ideas that posting a blog entry for is a bit of an overhead, you know what I mean? I need something I can tap to easily and write a quick thought or revelation that comes to my mind. 140 chars should do the trick, no? :)

So I set myself with a Twitter account and it's here:
https://twitter.com/Flashmattic.

For now, only confirmed followers have access to it... suites me at this point. Not everyone should go there ;)

I hope you'll find the twits interesting and given I'm an easily distracted person, you can expect a lot of them :)

See you (also) there,

Cheers

What is a data grid?

I lately found myself explaining to different people what is a data grid, or to be more accurate, what is not a data grid.
There seems to be a common misunderstanding of what a data grid should do and what are it's responsibilities among developers and UX experts equally.
Below I will list what a data grid should not include with hopes it helps you in future debates over one of the most common component in RIA. Of course it really depends on UX requirements in the end, but given your UX is not trying to invent the wheel all over again, the following lines are true to you as well.

A data grid is not responsible for fetching it's data

The data grid should not know where it gets the data from nor the API which is behind the collection it receives. If you want a fully business-detached component there shouldn't be any call to the server from the data grids. This includes refreshing the data of course.

The actions available on the data grid are not a part of the data grid

Add, delete, refresh, export to excel etc. are all actions a user can do on the data of the data grid. The data, not the data grid.
Let's take "add" for example - you create a model, insert it into a collection (sync the server if required) and give the updated collection to the data grid to display it.
I can smell the next question popping - No! a toolbar is not a part of a data grid.

Paging is only triggered by the data grid, not done by it

Some data grids embed paging mechanism, but as mentioned before, grids do not fetch their data, and given that paging is actually fetching the data with params, the grid should not handle the paging but just dispatch an event with the page number, start index and range included. "Someone" else should take this data and fetch the page.

Filtering is not the grid's business

Again, grids do not fetch their data. Filtering is actually fetching a data with constraints to it. Do it elsewhere and bring the results to the grid.

Sorting, in most cases, is done on the server...

I know that most grids support sorting within results, meaning that they sort the results which were already fetched, but in most cases you would like to go to the server and ask for a new sorted data, since the results exceed the page row limit (or lazy load limit). In these cases, the data grid simply tells that one of it's header were clicked, and let's other do the fetching for it.

Bottom line...

The data grid is mainly for displaying data, not messing around with it. pretty simple concept that keeps slipping under UX big mocks. If you keep your grid at doing what it should and nothing more, you will create a more reusable and portable component.

Take care.

Flashmattic or JSMattic?

I guess that this post is out for all who have approached me and asked if it wasn't time for me to change my blog name into something more suitable to what I'm actually practicing for the past year or so - JavaScript. Well, it's not really JavaScript, since I played around with all kinds of technologies like GWT, Grails and some libraries on top of JS like ExtJS, but yeah, they had it right - I haven't been practicing (nor preaching) Flex or Flash.

There is no question here. Flashmattic.

Flash, my friends, is a state of mind and I'm sure that all my Flash/Flex mates will agree. The Flash/Flex communities were the most exciting forums I had the privileged to be a part of. Developers who took a relatively simple technology and made amazing stuff with it, including the creation of RIA.

Being a Flash-Developer meant that you had to think outside the box, always looking for ways to amaze people using your products. It is no wonder that the top Flash developers of the time are now among the top JS developers of today, people like Grant Skinner and Jesse Warden bring their creative minds into the not-so-recent-dry-as-F&^k JavaScript realms (Hey, the JS community is so hyped about discovering the MV* patterns in a way that makes any Flex developer ROFL).

So, my friends - This blog's name remains Flashmattic though you will see more and more content which has nothing to do with Flash.

Plus, it simply sounds better :)

Cheers.

Grails r:script and g:include - workaround

Hi,
As others did, I also bumped into this mess. I wanted to include a controller view into another view, and have the nested view contain JS which can be used on that view, but r:script and g:include are not best friends.
I found a workaround you might find useful as well. I simply add an empty r:script tag on the parent view (the one who is using the include) and that's it, like this:

Parent view, on the HEAD tag:

And in the nested view:

// Script here

Mind you that we're counting on using the main.gsp layout (or some other layout which supports r:script)

Flashmattic has a new code highligt

Hi guys,
A small update - I've took the little time I have to update the way the code is presented in my blog. I must say that I should have done this a long time ago...
You can see a sample here.
Now you will be able to read it easier and use it better. Unfortunately I don't have the time or patience to go over previous posts and modify them so you should only expect it from now on.

Cheers