This may be a subjective question, I am new here so keep that in mind...
I have searched and searched and been unable to determine what the best way is the do a tabbed menu for a webpage. The webserver is Unix based, so anything .NET is out of the question. It seems that AJAX/javascript is the 'nicest' way to go, but I've heard there are issues with certain browsers (especially IE). Is this true?
I'd rather have the flexibility offered by javascript than going for purely CSS based tabs, and have the menu tabs function correctly in all/the_most browsers.
Thanks in advance for helping!
Welcome to SO. To answer your question, I would recommend you take a look at jQuery's tab control API:
http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/
The advantage of doing this on the client side is that you won't have to worry about what the backend platform supports, only browser compatibility.
If you're wanting to use AJAX it depends on whether you're loading dynamic content or not. Unfortunately a lot of things can be a tad funky in IE.
You should be able to use JQuery for creating tabs, check out JQuery UI for examples or search for other plugins.
This is basically using JS and you could have a fall back CSS version incase browser doesn't support Javascript. Using JQuery also is independent of you using any other language (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET etc).
Related
I've been researching the use of Bootstrap for my next project. The controls that it implements seem to be very similar to those in the AJAX Toolkit. I was then wondering if this was a new evolutionary path that I must consider or just a branch in terms of using script-based programming or more traditional .NET/C#/JavaScript based approach.
Will AJAX still be viable for web development?
If I use a non-MVC/ASP.Net approach, should I use Bootstrap or AJAX Controls?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can give me.
Ajax is very viable for web development. It is built into frameworks like jQuery. It may be confusing though because you see the term used in things like the asp.net ajax control toolkit, which do a lot of interesting things client-side. A lot of those client-side things like the modal popup exist in other scripting libraries like jQuery UI and Bootstrap.
Separate the real purpose of AJAX which is to perform asynchronous communication with the server and ignore the other items that get confused with AJAX (like the aforementioned AJAX control toolkit).
Bootstrap is a responsive design framework. It has lots of built-in components such as the modal, tab, alert, etc.. Don't confuse these with AJAX either, they're just great client-side functions. The AJAX control toolkit also has similar features, but few parts have much to do with true AJAX other than the fact they make use of scripting features introduced in 2008 with the System.Web.Extensions namespace. Things like the $find() method.
Look at Bootstrap to focus on the UI, it's presentation, and some interaction components. Use the parts that make sense to you. If you have an Ajax Control Toolkit modal that works in your application just fine, you don't need to replace it with the Bootstrap modal as you may need to do other things to get the two to behave the same. Bootstrap is an awesome framework for client-side development, and can easily work with ASP.Net, though it's easier to do with MVC simply because of the design principles of MVC versus Webforms.
I'm looking for a set of Javascript based UI components for a web app I'm building and have found that many of the best looking web apps were built with the Capuccino framework; see http://www.getflow.com/, http://www.picsengine.com/home/ and http://timetableapp.com/ for examples.
However, I'm not a Cocoa developer and have no interest in learning Objective-J. Ideally, I'd find a set of components that provide the visual end result of Capuccino apps without the underlying weight of the framework.
I have seen the Aristo jQuery UI them (http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/482577430/introducing-aristo-a-jquery-ui-theme), but jQuery UI just doesn't seem to have the depth of components available in Capuccino.
I realize this may be a long shot, but I figured it can't hurt to ask. :)
Thanks.
As another option, there is jQuery UI: nice if you are already familiar with jQuery, with the plus side of not being too heavyweight, but may not have all the components you need pre-defined. A nice thing is that it encourages to write the HTML in a way that degrades gracefully when your application in older browsers.
Maybe sproutcore is an alternative for you, although it requires you to hand-code everything in javascript from scratch. It offers most basic components and is easily adjustable to your personal design goals. Sproutcore is used in Apples Mobile Me and in some other big projects.
Another possibility might by vaadin which offers a rich set of prebuild controls and is based on Googles GWT javascript compiler. But it only makes sense if you are developing in a java environment.
I already know Asp.net and C#. I want to build web site, and I need to choose between learning Silverlight or learning Ajax.
The site will be (visual) with nice tables and a little graphics, and with hard work with db.
My question is what is the recommended way for me, and the reasons.
Thank u and sorry for my English.
Microsoft's current position would indicate that you should go with Asp.Net + HTML + CSS + jQuery (I would use MVC as it gives you much better control as to what gets rendered in the page, but that's just a recommendation).
http://mashable.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-silverlgiht-html/
Even if we ignore all the news regarding this shift from SilverLight to what's commonly being called "HTML5", learning & using jQuery + HTML + CSS has several advantages:
From a personal standpoint, all the knowledge you'll get will be useful for C# and for any other languages you need to use in the future for developing web apps.
Using Silverlight (or flash) you are basically telling search engines to ignore you. Ok, maybe it's not so radical, but you'll have a hard time trying to make your page climb positions in Google & Bing, if you intend to do so.
Silverlight makes you depend on a browser plugin. Your page won't work in any OS or browser that doesn't have the plugin installed.
You'll find much more information and documentation for jQuery + HTML than for Silverlight, as jQuery is used not only with C#, but also with PHP, Java...
As a benefit of using Silverlight, however, you will gain the ability to stream DRM'd content (it's actually Silverlight's and Flash's main strength right now). How useful that will be to you, I don't know.
The question promotes somewhat subjective answers, so please understand that the answers will vary from person to person.
I would prefer AJAX in this instance. If you need to do a lot of animation then silverlight is probably your best bet. However, if you're looking just to display tabular data (with some graphics), the most commonly used approach (by my observation) is to use AJAX to populate tabular data.
The most common use I see for Silverlight these days is media streaming and proof of concepts.
First of all, I'm sorry because of this lame question. But I'm kind of lost in all dynamic-html, ajax, etc stuff. So i decided get help from the pros.
Basically what I'm trying to do is creating a web page which have dynamic content(messages) coming from a web server(asp.net or php) presented in floating(movable by viewer) boxes in the page. And those boxes will be created dynamically upon a trigger from the server. And the viewer should be able to draw lines between those boxes to connect them(this information will also be sent/received to/from the server). Now which technologies should i use to have this? Is a combination of ajax+html5+jscript enough for this? Or do i need libraries like Yahoo's YUI, Google's GWT, etc.? Or, is flash/silverlight the best solution? Or something else?
Thanks
I'm no pro but I'd go for the HTML+JS+CSS version. As for the libraries, they'll help you in getting your content accross the many browsers and provide you with some nice utilities ;)
You don't need frameworks to do any of this. They might make the job easier, but, ultimately, they'll produce HTML and Javascript that make use of AJAX to get the job done.
Sounds like a big job, so be sure consider appropriate server-side and Javascript frameworks, and good luck.
You first have to decide between HTML5/JS/CSS, Flash and Silverlight for your client technology. Consider the client machines you need to support (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad etc.)
You then pick your server-side language/platform. AJAX is your communication medium.
If you're going with HTML5/JS/CSS you'd like to pick a JS framework to speed up development. jQuery makes for quick coding. Other frameworks may have more features but are more abstracted from plain JS. You might want to use GWT if you're more familiar with Java than Javascript.
I always have to check each and every browser to see if my website would work. Is there a website where I can check it with?
Update:
I don't really want just screenshots (which what browsershots do), I want to actually test the posting of my script.
You want a web site to check your web site for javascript compatibility? How would you expect it to know how to exercise your interface to trigger the proper interactions? Or are you thinking of it doing some sort of static code analysis? I think you are better off coding against a framework that has solved most of the browser-dependent idiosyncrasies and using it to check for browser capabilities before you use them. jQuery, MooTools, Prototype/Scriptaculous, etc. go a long way in solving these problems for javascript.
Note that you still need to worry about rendering your site, but you already have several answers for how to go about doing that based on web sites. Personally, I just maintain IE/Safari/FF/Opera/Chrome on my workstation and do significant checking in IE/FF and basic checking in Safari/Opera/Chrome.
Even when there exist websites that allow you to see a static snapshot of your site in several browsers, you should really test your page on them yourself, because there can be subtle, and not so subtle, bugs and differences that are only apparent when interacting with the webpage.
You can cover yourself quite a lot by testing in
A Gecko engine browser (Firefox)
A Webkit engine browser (Chrome, Safari, Konqueror)
Opera
AND IE6+
John Resig recommends checking the Yahoo graded browser support documentation.
If you write unit tests for your javascript, you could use testswarm http://testswarm.com
There are multiple options:
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
These site will let you run multiple browsers and version without installing. You only need to install a plugin
http://spoon.net/browsers/
There are plenty of sites, just Google/Bing for browser compatibility check.
http://browsershots.org/ is a good one.
Although most of them just take a snapshot of the site, you might have to do the manual check for things like menus and dynamic content.
BrowserShots might do what you want if you can tell by rendering a particular URL whether or not things will work as expected.
In light of your update, you could still use BrowserShots by creating a page which tests each of your scripts and renders 'pass' or 'fail' as its content depending on whether they work or not.
Failing that, Multiple IE is quite useful for running various versions of IE on one PC which can otherwise be problematic.