Take a look at this blog post mail chimp released a few months back:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/chimp-charts-are-here/
The ones you see there are pretty amazing looking, and they function great. It uses Flash.
I'd love to know what they are using to make that happen, is anyone aware?
Even better, they also have other amazing looking charts that are NOT flash... take a look at this:
This is the chart type that I am far more interested in. The graphs flow up when the page loads (assuming jQuery) - and bounce into place. Then, you can click them for links to more information.
Does anyone know if this is created fram scratch by them, or if there is a similar package that's available out there?
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of premade chart libraries for JS (as well as Flash). Do a simple google search and you are bound to find what you are looking for. Otherwise most of it can be easily replicated by hand with jQuery (if you want them to be dynamic).
However, if you want to do curvy charts yourself with JavaScript then it's either HTML5 Canvas, http://raphaeljs.com/ or similar "technologies".
Random search hits on google:
http://www.highcharts.com/
http://g.raphaeljs.com/
http://javascript.open-libraries.com/utilities/chart/20-best-javascript-charting-and-plotting-libraries/
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/free-javascript-charts-library-js-charts/
Related
I need to create a multi step dynamic order form. There will be 3-4 pages of questions. When someone makes a choice there is a div summary at the end with all the choices made. The client can then edit a choice by clicking that entries edit link. The form will contain text boxes, bullets and a dynamic google map. At the end of this process i want to get an email with the google map as well as the choices.
I am not looking for someone to help me do this whole thing, i am just looking for someone to point me in the right direction so that i can research the appropriate technology required to make this work. I will be using Google Static Maps Api v2 and jquery. Would prefer to keep this as a html5 doc but php is ok too.
Any advice?
This sounds like a pretty standard dynamic order form. You can use html5 for the input types, but other than that I wouldn't use any specific html5 technology (unless you really wanted local storage in case someone left accidentally and came back or something). If you know PHP, it would work fine as a back end for the post fields with _SESSION.
This is not an extreme project, so it shouldn't be hard to find resources on how you can do this with HTML/PHP. Why not start with a simpler form and build from there?
I'm trying to traverse the whole PhoneGap thing to get a native app up and running. I am completely fine with creating html5 markup for the actual app, what I need help with is trying to pull in dynamic content from a website. In particular, there is some content on our website that also needs to be in the app. We use a program call Expression Engine that handles all of our content. The content that I would need to pull over would be:
Sermon Videos
Sermon Series
Locations
Plain text content
The majority of the app will be local, but there are some dynamic needs as you can see. I've read a couple things that say "JSON" is the way to go, but it looks pretty complicated as I'm not quite familiar with AJAX. Is this the only way or are there any options or resources anyone can point me to that might help. I'm not even sure if that method would work for our website. I appreciate any help you can provide.
They are correct. What you need to look into is AJAX/JSON and how to present your data to your app using these technologies.
Expression Engine would actually be quite a good choice for this as its template system is quite flexible. There are even add-on modules for delivering your content as JSON if you want t go that route.
A quick google led me to: http://samcroft.co.uk/2011/updated-loading-data-in-phonegap-using-jquery-1-5/
It's a bit more than you need since you will have your content in an existing CMS instead of creating a new database to store the data, but the concepts will hold true and I am sure you will be able to use it to find more tutorials that suit you better.
I have a PHP page powered by jQuery. A singel page has four steps, controlled by jQuery.
In diffrent steps, user selects two Images from two galleries (step 1 & 2), fromats a table by arranging divs inbetween (setp 3) then filling a form (step 4).
I want: when user clicks "Finish" on step 4. All the above information be converted to PDF and emailed to the provided email address.
Please suggest me idea, tool, plugin or code to do so!
The last time that I tried to auto-generate PDFs as you mentioned, I used a php library called fpdf. As I recall, it was difficult and cumbersome. My lack of knowledge/experience/patience definetly made me not have much fun working with it. Give it a shot and see if looks like it is feasible for you. The site has some getting started examples, and a quick Google search should yield some examples too. URL: http://www.fpdf.org/
I just stumbled across another library that looks promising: http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/ I have not used it, but, if I need to do this again in the future, I would try this before going back to fpdf.
I don't know of any javascript/jQuery plugins that can generate a PDF, so I think you are stuck with PHP in this scenario.
Hope that helps a bit!
EDIT: The email part is simple, I really like Swift Mailer: http://swiftmailer.org. It is simple to use, lots of examples, and supports a variety of options, like, attachments. Also handles the encoding issues that generally plague emails sent directly from php mail().
One more thing, if you are not too far into development, take a look at using Kohana as a php framework. It's light and easily extensible. They follow decent coding standards, and have an active open source community. Plus, there is a module for SwiftMailer that almost sends the mail for you-Not really...but I think you get the point. ;)
Have a look at http://andreasgal.github.com/pdf.js/
A friend has asked me for help with her website design. Although I know a fair amount about the basics behind HTML, XML, Php, ASP.Net, javascript, etc., I'm not really comfortable sitting down and coding from scratch. All of the work I do is in Java, C++, and so on.
My friend would like to add a vertically scrolling marquee to her site - no problem, there is code for that all over the internet. Here is the tricky part - she would like the text to be dynamically pulled from another website. This isn't like a simple text file, either - it's a list of names from a specific blog post, so there would be a lot of text processing involved to wade through all of the other markup, and extract the relevant info.
The way I see it, here are her options -
1) Write some kind of a perl script or somesuch that is set to run daily. This script will visit the blog and extract the necessary info. It will then update the HTML file's marquee text with its new info.
2) Some sort of active page written in ASP or PHP that will dynamically build the marquee (and the rest of the site) each time the site is visited, basically doing the work of the perl script each time. This seems like it has the potential to be somewhat slow.
Per my understanding, those are her only options. Am I correct? There is no simply way to do this in javascript that I am just missing? I know you can reference an image to be dynamically pulled with the marquee, but this isn't that simple...
Thanks.
EDIT: I guess where I was going with my question was this: Unless I implement this statically, this is going to be fairly involved, right? I believe it is over my head. This is why I would like to simply copy/paste the text list into the html document. It would need to be updated every time the blog does, but that only appears to happen every few months, so that's not a large chore. I realize this is a lazy solution, but this is from someone very inexperienced in web development.
For reference, this is the SPECIFIC blog post which the text will come from, and my friend would ONLY like to display that list of names that begins when you scroll several paragraphs down.
http://truthnottasers.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-follows-are-names-where-known.html
It depends what the list of names looks like, i.e. how much intelligence is needed to parse it. But this could be something that could be fairly easily be pulled, parsed and displayed using Ajax, for example in the jquery flavour.
All the blogs I have ever seen have an RSS feed. Why not just grab the feed?... Google provides javascript that does only this.
Google Ajax Feed API
The RSS suggestion sounds good. If you can't get it in the RSS you could screen scrape the content.
If you could do it with Javascript I think it would suffer the same resource issues as your once a day Perl script and every load asp/php methods since it would still have to fetch the web content by making a call to the web site.
Another option is to use asp.net and enable caching so that when other visitors come to the site instead of getting the page all over again it serves up the cached page. You can set this to cache for 24 hours or so. I'm sure other server languages have similar features. Basically this would be the same as your once a day Perl method but keep it within a web framework.
Another hacky solution would be to use an iframe and frame the content with javascript so that it only shows the content you want to show. Of course you'll have no control over the formatting (background, fonts) of the iframe and if the content gets bigger or changes position you'll have problems.
We have an ancient application that basically duplicates a file explorer, outlook style application in html (menu and toolbar on top, tree on the left, gridview on the right, and yes I know it is a bad idea to bring desktop UI to the web, but it was 2000 and seemed like a good idea at the time). The main problem (other than the HTML is from ~2000) is that it is an Internet Explorer only application, and due to the horrible html is a nightmare to update.
What is the best set of HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP libraries to achieve this? I have looked a YUI, MooTools, JQuery, and a bunch of others but none seem to have exactly what I need. I would prefer if I could just use PHP libraries, but good HTML/CSS/Javascript libraries would be fine too. The requirements are:
Menus (Top Menu and Context Menu).
Tree (preferably ajax, lazy loading, we have 5000 nodes in the tree and it takes a while to load now).
Windows and Modal Dialog boxes.
Splitter for the Grid and the TreeView.
Nice to haves
Heirachacal grid.
Tool tips.
Thanks in advance for the suggestions...
Have you checked Qooxdoo or Capuccino? It looks like they might cover the UI necessities that you have for this particular project, given that they are oriented to provide the GUI Desktop goodness to the web; make sure to check their demos.
As for the Server side PHP part, I would certainly try to taylor it to my needs but If I had to choose a framework I would go for Yii, Code Igniter or CakePHP, depending of your scalability needs.
Cheers!
I would suggest looking at ExtJS for this sort of thing. You can then quite easily send data between it and PHP using JSON. The grids and trees are very easy to populate from a URL that will provide JSON.