Using window.name as a transport for cooperative cross-domain communication is a reasonably well-known and well-researched technique. I came across it via two blog posts by members of the GWT community that were using it to submit GWT FormPanels to endpoints on other domains.
I came across the Mix Gestalt project tonight and I thought I’d share some thoughts. It’s a bit of script that effectively sucks code snippets in languages other than Javascript out of your page and converts them to programs running on the .NET platform.
While interesting, it has a number of drawbacks that make it far less interesting than the HTML5-based approach that works in the standards-compliant browsers based on WebKit, Gecko and Opera, as well as the improved IE8.
Here’s a neat CSS-only panel that you can use to disable controls within a given <div> element. It uses an absolutely-positioned <div> within the container of controls you’d like to disable. The glass panel is positioned using CSS to overlap the controls, and set partially transparent to give the controls a disabled look.
Note that this only works in standards mode, <!DOCTYPE html>, due to IE’s painfully outdated quirks mode. Additionally, your container of controls needs to be styled as overflow: hidden to work around the limitations of the height expression and position: relative so the parent can become a CSS positioning parent.
I’ve been using this trick for a while and I thought I’d share it. For those who live by Eclipse’s quickfixes, it’s not entirely obvious that it’s legal.
If you have legacy code like the code below, where foo.list() is a Java 1.4-compatible method returning java.util.List, you’ll normally see an “unchecked cast” warning on the assignment like so:
public void doSomeListStuff(Foo foo) {
List list = foo.list(); // Warning: unchecked cast
for (Blah blah : list) {
frobinate(blah);
}
}
Normally, Eclipse offers to fix it for you like this:
UPDATE: It’s live! The open-source project is up on Google Code and I’ve blogged a more about it.
I’m getting closer to having the GWT bindings that we wrote for Firefox ready for public release. What we’ve got is more than enough to write a complex extension. The bindings were even enough to write a prototype of an OOPHM server, itself written in GWT!
For now, just a taste of what extension development is like GWT, complete with strong typing, syntax checks, auto-completion and hosted mode support:
After receiving my Google Voice invite tonight and picking a phone number, seemingly at random, I discovered that I had picked a number with the same last four digits as one of my friends’ numbers. If you are familiar with the Birthday Paradox, you might recognize the form of the problem.
Every developer has a different opinion of stored procedures. If you’ve worked on a few projects that involve databases, you’ll inevitably come across the as part of a project.
I’ve personally had a love/hate relationship with them. They require maintenance scripts like your regular table structure, but they aren’t structure. Generally, databases don’t give you good introspection ability for stored procedures either - fire-and-forget management.
If you’re not familiar with video4all, let me start off with a quick intro: It allows you to use the standards-compliant HTML5 <video> tag on any browser, freeing you from the complexity of configuring markup for multiple video formats.
I’ve been tweaking the video4all source a bit since last night’s late release to fix some issues with other browsers and clean up some of the code. Adding support for browsers without binding languages was pretty simple - a setInterval runs and checks for new video elements every few seconds, converting them to flash embeds as needed. It’s not ideal (DOM mutation events would be great here), but it does a decent enough job.
I’ve been working on a small project to bring support for the HTML5 <video> tag to older browsers, hoping to encourage use of this tag. The idea is to use Flash’s video/mp4 support as a “downlevel” emulator for the video tag.
It uses an HTC binding in IE and an XBL binding in Mozilla to create a flash video in place of the video tag itself. The flash video support is provided by the excellent FlowPlayer, which supports playing mp4 videos out-of-the-box.
Quick round-up/review of the books I’ve read this first half of the year.
Check out the double rainbow from today’s weather. Fantastic!
I spent the last few days shoehorning Windows 7 into one of the laptops I’ve got around the house. My day-to-day desktop for development is a MacBook Pro, but I spend some time testing on Windows. I haven’t had a chance to update my Windows knowledge from where I left it at the XP level, so I figured it would be a good time to give Vista’s successor a shot.
