W. Hardy Interactive, Inc. Blogs

In spite of its other flaws as an operating system, Windows Vista did get one thing right: the taskbar calendar. This little calendar provides a multi-level navigation interface, allowing you to easily move from an individual month up to the year containing that month, then up to the decade containing that year, and finally up to the century containing that decade (Powers of Ten, anyone?). It also gives you the ability to navigate forward and backward at each level. The visual animation is slick, providing a zoom effect when moving between levels, and a scrolling effect when moving left and right.
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The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library Calendar control is a very useful item for any dynamic web application requiring users to input dates–for example, when scheduling bill payments, searching for plane flights, booking hotel accommodations, and so on. The YUI control is particularly nice because it is programmatically rich and yet easily customizable.

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The GMarker, GEvent, GInfoWindow and related classes in the Google Maps API allow you to easily create markers on a map which are interactive and which provide valuable information to users. Often it is convenient to extend such interaction beyond the actual map itself, allowing other elements in the web application to alter markers on the map, retrieve and show information, and so on. In this tech note, I provide a simple example of this, demonstrating how to make simple HTML links trigger Google Maps markers and display information.

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Recently I encountered an interesting (and very frustrating) case of session state corruption occurring in one of our ColdFusion/AJAX-based search applications. The application allows users to search for various types of listings using an interface that features AJAX pagination. This means that as users navigate through pages of search results, an entire HTML document is not reloaded; instead, asynchronous JS requests are made to pull in new result sets, and user HTML is updated dynamically on the client side.

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Recently I had the opportunity to install Moodle—a PHP-driven, open source course management system for online learning—on one of our enterprise class servers running Sun Solaris 10 and Sun Java System Web Server 7.0. While there were a number of packages available to simplify the installations of some versions of PHP and Moodle, I needed to install Moodle 1.9, for which there were not suitable packages readily available. In this entry I document the steps I took to perform manual installations of both pieces of software, as well as some of the technical issues I ran into along the way.

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