Playing around with jQuery

The working week on Naxos was quite successful. I had put myself under pressure at the start of the week, feeling that there is lots to do and a few big open questions in the code.

My task was to feature up a part of one of my apps, where a heavy form requires lots of user interaction. Some more interactive toys would actually make things more useful. The problem was that the underlying data provider is a piece of PDF (at the lowest base). That's sometimes a weird bit of tech to deal with. It took me a while to wrangle the data I need out of it and put it into shape. Then there came the task of juicing it up. On the web, JavaScript is still the toy for this. A toy I never really liked. Nowadays we don't use "JavaScript" any more. We use libraries that use JavaScript. One of them is jQuery.

Turns out it's quite easy to use. I got a book (thanks Wu!) about it, which gave me a start. Then you just string stuff together. A good knowledge of HTML and CSS helps a lot, obviously, since most of the time you mess with these things. It's still JavaScript for one simple reason though: when you get stuck, debugging in the browser is the same pain as it always was. There were some moments, where I just wondered if my browser had stopped working and got stuck. One little semicolon left out and everything sticks its little feet in the air and plays dead.

In the end, I got something together. The nice part is that it's not only something that has moved forward somewhere deep in the code, but actually that you can see and play around with. So I'm relaxed on the way back to Athens.