Great jQuery Date Picker
For my new blog’s archive page, I wanted a quick way for people to select the range of dates they want to search (in addition to regular searching and browsing). Date picker calendar seemed like a nice complement to a text box where you can enter date ranges. Surprisingly, many date picker widgets for jQuery failed miserably at this. Most of them required two text boxes, or were stupendously complex (as in ‘you get many small files in a zipball and expect you to load most of them’). The only one that truly shined was aptly named DatePicker.
The calenadar control from EyeCon is super-customizable. It covers most calendar usage scenarios known to mankind, and it’s also very easy to specify all of its options. The only two issues I had with it is that I cannot restrict pickable dates to only those in the past, and that it’s .zip package contains myriads of files I don’t really need. Other than that, I’m really happy with it.
RDBPaste: Pure JavaScript Pastebin
Yes, it’s one of those projects that call for a very skeptical response… You rarely, if ever, write a whole web app using JavaScript alone. Delegating business logic entirely to browsers is still a relatively new concept, and most developers (myself included) rather stick to known methods of running server-side scripts to do the job. Database access is one of the main hurdles in doing this. David over from RDBHost has been offering a solution to this problem for some time now, and he’s been finishing the JavaScript API. Now that the API is stable and documented, he wanted me to give it a test-drive and write an app that would make full use of it.
JSPaste: Things Work!
As you can see, one of the updates since last time is the project name. Since this project is a demonstration of what RDBHost and it’s JavaScript API can do, I decided to change the name so it doesn’t appear as if this project was developed by RDBHost. Of course, the new address of the project is jspaste.brankovukelic.com. I’ve had some problems during these few days, and together with David from RDBHost, I managed to overcome most of them, so I’ll write about them here.
JSPaste: It’s Alive and A’Pastin
I’m very pleased with the JSPaste progress. After the minor glitch was fixed, RDBHost was very pleasant to work with, and I’m actually starting to like the idea of creating database-powered JavaScript apps. :D Anyway, the JSPaste project has reached the point of fulfilling the basic task after about a week in development.
JSPaste: What’s cooking
JSPaste: File Uploads and User Authentication
It’s official, RDBHost is one well-thought-out service. The more stuff I try with JSPaste, the more it is possible to achieve without a line of (custom) server-side code. All bases seem to be covered, and little glitches I have right now will eventually be fixed, I’m sure. Even though I am still recovering from flu, I sat down yesterday, and hacked together the file upload and download code, as well as basic user authentication (allows you to delete the pastes you created yourself). We’re nearing the end of second sprint on this project, and the final release of 1.0 is close. (And who would have thought a pastebin can require so much work? Kudos to all pastebin developers.)
JSPaste: Now with Own Domain and Improvements
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on JSPaste. The many projects, tiredness, day job… too many things on my mind. Anyway, the project is well and alive. I don’t know if you’ve noticed various bits and pieces that appeared on the site, but things are certainly moving towards 1.0 release.
One important improvement: JSPaste now has it’s own domain. You can now use it at www.jspaste.com, too.
