As every other average Italian around, I share my dose of being an in-decent speaker; to say the least.

I’m fairly decent at writing, I’m good at reading and listening; I really fuck up everything when I open my mouth

So, time to face the truth; and I decided to do it with style: Setting up a new Vimeo Channel around the fantastic world of Javascript Software Development;
So it came to life the new Vimeo channel “Javascript bites” . you can find it at http://vimeo.com/channels/jsbites

New Vimeo channel "Javascript Bites"

It’s a sort of an experiment.

The purpose is to share what I know and what I do around the language and, at the same time, to exorcise my long lasting fear at speaking; It will also serve the purpose to force my brain into an english speaking thinking process that, eventually, will improve my vocabolary and (I hope!) my pronunciation.

So, if you feel interested, bear with me and keep that into consideration when you’ll listen to the videos

Cheers!

PS: if you ask yourself where the cool music loop is coming from, the answer is here

The 2010 Open Source Award Winners included the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award winner CMS Made Simple, Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award winner jQuery and Pimcore the winner of the Most Promising Open Source Project Award.

The 2011 Awards will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced and the vote of the public becoming more influential. This year all CMS projects will compete in an even tighter contest in the Open Source CMS Award category with the now defunct Hall of Fame CMS finalists re-entered into the CMS category. Projects such as Drupal and Joomla! will face off with CMS Made Simple and MODx for the first time since 2008.

While the Most Promising Open Source Project and the Open Source JavaScript Libraries categories will be back for a second year, Packt is introducing new categories for Open Source Business Applications, Open Source Multimedia Software and Open Source Mobile Toolkit and Libraries. These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards remain committed to providing the platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting Open Source projects both new and old.

“We’ve managed to continue to provide new levels of accessibility for Open Source projects, while encouraging a more competitive nature in the contest by increasing the public votes influence. Additionally, we thought it would be a great idea to reward more projects thus we’ve introduced sub-category awards across a number of the categories during the voting stage. We expect the Awards this year to be bigger and better.” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins mid-September. For more information on the categories, read Packt’s recent announcement: www.packtpub.com/blog/2011-open-source-awards-announcement

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com

You create your own namespace function but you don’t want it to hang around in the global namespace.. would be cool to have it inside a namespace.. but, because you’re a geek and you adhere maniacally to the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself), you want to create that namespace using your own lovely hand-crafted function..

mmh…sounds like a circular loop… but the solution is easy: just create an immediate function that creates a local namespace function, calls it (creating the namespace) and assign the local function to a namespace property.. you can pass the namespace name to this immediate function, and you’ll end up with a fully created namespace with the namespace function in place within it.

A piece of code is worth a thousand words:

(function(name){
  function namespace(nspace) {
    var nspaces = !nspace ? '' : nspace.split('.');
    var parent = window;
    for( i in nspaces ) {
      if( typeof parent[nspaces[i]] == 'undefined' ) {
        parent[nspaces[i]] = {};
      }
      parent = parent[nspaces[i]];
    }
    //let's return the innermost namespace, to allow for
    //immediate use..
    return parent;
  }
  namespace(name).namespace = namespace;
})('my.namespace');

Isn’t it beautifully geek ?

I’m just starting playing with it right now, so I’m not giving here expert advices.
Though, this morning I was wondering around how to handle cards switching in a panel without having to “remember” to destroy them every time.
If you are just not thinking about that, your interface sometimes can become a little bit cluttered if you start requesting the rendering of the same panel more than once. So, sooner or later you’ve to deal with it, especially if you care about performances and memory management in your application.

I know, it’s a very simple thing to do: You create your panel and simply set up a listener that cleans it up when it’s deactivated:

MyApp.views.MyPanel = Ext.extend( Ext.Panel, {
    listeners: {
      'deactivate': function(panel) { panel.destroy(); }
    }
} );

That simple, I know. But you have to remember it, and put it in every single panel you create. I hate things like that, it smells so heavily of a plain violation of the DRY principle.

And you can have another problem.. It seems that if you click repeatedly on your tab button to activate your card, you don’t receive the “deactivate” event every time (look at the picture):

A possible solution is to create a hierarchy, namely a base class from which your panel extend. This base class can implement the necessary behavior to setup a listener on deactivation.

If you don’t want to mess up with inheritance (or you simply can’t, because your panels already are deeply inserted into a custom inheritance chain), you can resort to a very simple solution..

Immediately “after” including the sencha-touch.js in your html, add this piece of JS code:

//Allow for automatic cleanup of last panel when setting a new one..
(function(){
    var panelSetActiveItem = Ext.Panel.prototype.setActiveItem;
    Ext.override( Ext.Panel, {
        setActiveItem: function( panel, obj ) {
            if( this.getActiveItem() )
                this.getActiveItem().destroy();

            panelSetActiveItem.apply( this, arguments );
        }
    } );
}());

That’s it. Essentially, we are overriding the Sencha Panel setActiveItem, instructing our overriding function to destroy whatever panel presently rendered before switching in the new card.
It’s obviously a solution that cannot fit every bill. It depends on your needs, but if you need to make the swipe clean when you set your active card in your panel, this solution should met your expectation 100%, without incurring in any of the glitch that you can have using a ‘deactivate’ listener in your panels.
And you gain another advantage: you can “refresh” your card simply hitting another time your tab button (that results in a destroy/activate chain of events).

This book is, in this regard, exactly what the community was waiting for.

Igor is very clear, specific and never prosaic; The given examples are down-to-earth, real world examples of what you would expect to find and bang your head against when you develop your average Apache Wicket application.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a particular aspect of the framework: Validating and converting user input, forms, i18n, data tables and views, tabs and borders, Ajax, charts, security and integration with middlewares (Spring, JBoss Weld, JPA).
(you can find an example chapter here).

It has not to be read sequentially; there are no long and complex projects to build and follow between each chapter; It’s organization is perfect for being used as a reference; each chapter contains specific examples of “problems” to solve, a workable solution to the problem and a thorough explanation of “how” the solution works.

Every chapter has its clues, its ‘tips’ and hints that make this book a memorable reading for every Wicket developer; even the most basic examples on how to work out validation of a field give precious hints on how validation works ‘under the hoods’, or when it’s better to access the value of a field during validation using the getConvertedInput() method instead of the model value (guess why ? read the book and you’ll know..)

Decorating components, creating grids and sorting/filtering data, blocking until Ajax requests complete, adding charts with Open Flash Charts library; this book is full of incredible useful information that every Wicket developer will be able to leverage to improve its productivity and knowledge of this fantastic framework.

London is crazy, really; No, you can’t understand what I mean;
You can go straight away to www.rightmove.co.uk and have a look for yourself: you see MANY wonderful apartments there, even many of them are at reasonable prices..

Then what ?

Well, it seems that the London rental market is full of SCAM! hundreds of false advertisements; you call the agency and suddenly they tell you that the apartment you were looking for has “just been rent; oh, but we have another one available that we can show you; sorry we have no pictures yet, cause it has just become available; come to see it!”
And then you start spending countless hours of your precious time, wandering around the city viewing horrible apartments, much uglier and much more expensive than the ones you saw on the website of the agencies.

And, btw, I’m not even touching the “paper-related” part of it! If you’re coming from abroad, like me, you have to consider that many agencies will ask for a “guarantor” that can guarantee for your accountability (sorry: who guarantees for the accountability of the agency then ??); let’s not even talk about the payment methods, the deposit you have to leave without even getting a receipt etc etc..

Anyway, making a long story short: we’re out, officially.
To cope with this situation we ended up booking a hotel for the next 8 nights, at the fabulous discounted price of 1300£.. cool, eh ?

We were reasonably happy with that; we’d just found a good and modern flat on rent and available at the end of the next week, so it was ok to pay for the hotel; we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!!

Happy handing then ? NO WAY

Today, cold shower from the agency renting the apartment we’re going to pay for (btw, we already paid the deposit, on the premise that it was being available at the end of the next week): The apartment will PROBABLY come available at the end of the month (well: they said “third week of the month”.. could you believe them ?)

Good: now we’re in a fucking expensive hotel, in such a small room that you can’t even turn around without hitting something (see the picture, please) and our situation sees us with a gap of 3 weeks to fill before entering into the apartment.

Good start, really a good start.

Today, surfing the net, I found a new browser window laying lazily on my desktop; opened by who-knows-what script (and this is alone a bad indicator).. it was pointing to a page, http://news-weekly.co.uk/finance/, advertising how a humble mother, working at home part-time, was easily able to build up more than 4.000£ (!!) in a month, using a never-heard before “Income Cash System” (wow, what a powerful name, isn’t it ?)..

This world renowned system had been advertised on various famous channels/magazines/websites, as seen on the header of the website:

Cool references, indeed.
Let’s try to click on one of those links.. Oh! every link you click, you end up on the same site and, guess what, is not anything related to the sites advertised in those links, but another “easy money making” website…

This should be more than enough to encourage any sane person to close the browser window and use the available time for some real hard working money making technique.

But I am stubborn and I feel a bit of sympathy for this funny website; so, let’s go on..

After a thorough and full of blah-blah thing presentations about this powerful method of making money, here comes the part that I love the most: the “public” comment system, where everyone can make a personal contribution and share experiences and hints about this popular technique.

Let’s see.. hum.. well, pretty up-to-date, full of positive comments about this wonderful method, with pictures of cheques and happy people.
What should I do next ? should I buy the package ?
Well, let’s try, first, to post a personal view about this technique..

So, I diligently fill the comment form, inserting my email, name and comment, and pushing the “Submit comment” button;
And promptly, I get a popup window that tells me that my comment has been submitted and will be reviewed for approval:

Mmhh.. too fast, really too fast.. this rings a bell in my head.
So, this time it’s me that “promptly” open the source of the page and look at the form submission code.. and what does it look like ?

I’ve to show you that, a picture is worth a thousand word:

Have you seen that ??? No, really!!
First, the form points to the action “#”, the page itself; then, when you press “Submit comment”, a fancy javascript pops up an alert with the aforementioned “pending approval” message (aahhh, it was too fast..) and.. return false!!!

And you know, if you return false on an event handler you “prevent” the default action.. so, the form is never submitted, and your comment with it.

Alas, I think I have nothing more to add; I’ll leave the reader to deduce if this money-making site is a SCAM or not….. for me, obviously IT IS.

If the owner of the site is a good person and can explain to me the rationale behind the fake links to the famous advertisers in the header and, most of all, the fake comment submission form, I’ll be very very pleased to make up my mind; this is still a blog, a real one, and anybody can comment about it, for real

For you impatient guys, here’s a link to a sample Chapter: Chapter 5: Displaying Data Using Data Table

Soo, after having written code for more than a decade, I just want to express my personal view on this topic: “when do you put curly braces on control structures ?”

In almost every book around, it seems that there’s only one single way to do that: “the K&R style” (who remembers Kernighan & Ritchie ? ;D ), who imposes putting curly braces on the “same line” where the control structure start:

if (condition) {
   code
} else {
   code
}

Well, honestly, I DON’T LIKE IT!
Probably because I come from an artistic background, probably because I’m old and dumb and I get easily lost when I see more than one or two levels of indented control structures; In Essence, I prefer something like this:

if( condition )
{
   code
}
else
{
   code
}

The point is that I look at my code as a “picture”.. I like to see “shapes” and layout patterns in the code, as I’m looking at a painting.. For me, code must be efficient as much as it must be “beautiful” to see and easy to read.

What do you think is more easier to read between these two snippets of code ? (it’s the same code written in the 2 styles)
(This example comes from PHP code but can, of course, be applied to Javascript,C,C++,Java programming languages as well)

(K&R common style):

if($form_id == "menu_overview_form" && $form['#menu']['menu_name'] == "footer-links"){
  $form['#submit'] = array('mymodule_footer_links_submit');
}elseif( $form_id == "taxonomy_overview_terms" && $form['#vocabulary']['name'] == 'Something'){
  $form['reset_alphabetical']['#access'] = '0';
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_taxonomy_overview_terms_submit';
  drupal_add_js( drupal_get_path( "module", "mymodule" ) . '/admin.js' );
  drupal_add_css( drupal_get_path( "module", "mymodule" ) . '/admin.css' );
}elseif( $form_id == "promotions_node_form" ){
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_featured_node_submit';
}elseif($form_id == "something_game_node_form"){
  $form['menu']['#access']          = '0';
  $form['revision_information']['#access']  = '0';
  $form['author']['#access']          = '0';
  $form['options']['promote']['#access']    = '0';
  $form['options']['sticky']['#access']     = '0';
  $form['path']['#access']          = '0';
  if (!empty($form['admin']['operations'])) {
            foreach ($form['admin']['operations'] as $nid => $title) {
              if (in_array($form['admin']['name'][$nid]['#value'], $weight_node_type_names) ) {
                $selector = mymodule_weight_node_selector($nid);
                unset( $form['admin']['operations'][$nid]['#value']);
                $form['admin']['operations'][$nid]['#value'] .= ' '. $selector['selector'];
                $form['admin']['status'][$nid]['#value'] .=  $selector['status'];
              }
            }
      }
  unset($form['options']['#collapsed']);
  unset($form['options']['#collapsible']);
  $form['#action'] = '/' . $_REQUEST['q'];
  $form['#destination'] = $_REQUEST['destination'];
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_featured_node_submit';
}

(My preferred style):

if( $form_id == "menu_overview_form" && $form['#menu']['menu_name'] == "footer-links" )
{
  $form['#submit'] = array('mymodule_footer_links_submit');
}
elseif( $form_id == "taxonomy_overview_terms" && $form['#vocabulary']['name'] == 'Something' )
{
  $form['reset_alphabetical']['#access'] = '0';
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_taxonomy_overview_terms_submit';
  drupal_add_js( drupal_get_path( "module", "mymodule" ) . '/admin.js' );
  drupal_add_css( drupal_get_path( "module", "mymodule" ) . '/admin.css' );
}
elseif( $form_id == "promotions_node_form" )
{
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_featured_node_submit';
}
elseif( $form_id == "something_game_node_form" )
{
  $form['menu']['#access']          = '0';
  $form['revision_information']['#access']  = '0';
  $form['author']['#access']          = '0';
  $form['options']['promote']['#access']    = '0';
  $form['options']['sticky']['#access']     = '0';
  $form['path']['#access']          = '0';
  if( !empty( $form['admin']['operations'] ) )
  {
    foreach( $form['admin']['operations'] as $nid => $title )
    {
      if( in_array( $form['admin']['name'][$nid]['#value'], $weight_node_type_names ) )
      {
        $selector = mymodule_weight_node_selector($nid);
        unset( $form['admin']['operations'][$nid]['#value']);
        $form['admin']['operations'][$nid]['#value'] .= ' '. $selector['selector'];
        $form['admin']['status'][$nid]['#value'] .=  $selector['status'];
      }
    }
  }
  unset($form['options']['#collapsed']);
  unset($form['options']['#collapsible']);
  $form['#action'] = '/' . $_REQUEST['q'];
  $form['#destination'] = $_REQUEST['destination'];
  $form['#submit'][] = 'mymodule_featured_node_submit';
}

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2010. That’s about 8 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 20 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 7mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 14th with 54 views. The most popular post that day was About Davide Molin.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, ilsole24ore.com, linkedin.com, en.wordpress.com, and javascriptweblog.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for cintiq, cintiq 12wx, wicket choicerenderer, wicket img resource, and choicerenderer.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

About Davide Molin February 2010

Simple Wicket ChoiceRenderer for any kind of Object March 2010
19 comments

Wicket Image tag linking to an external resource May 2010
4 comments

How to Manually Inject a Wicket SpringBean dependency April 2010
1 comment

Super-Easy DropDownChoice Renderer for String values March 2010
6 comments