Has anyone any reources for learning how to implement SVG with php/mysql (and possibly with php-gtk)? I am thinking of making a top-down garden designer, with drag and drop predefined elements (such as trees/bushes) and definable areas of planting (circles/squares). Gardeners could then track over time how well planting did in a certain area.
I don´t really want to get into flash...
I'm looking for a similar solution, and the two relevant questions here are Scripting SVG and Displaying vector graphics in a browser.
Neither of them give much hope, though, as each browser has different vector capabilities. Dojox.gfx appears to be a cross browser javascript graphics library which may do everything you need, but it won't necesarily do it in SVG. Canvas is gaining a lot of support and interest.
-Adam
Here's what I found I guess in some other question, not sure though.
raphael
It's a javascript library for working with svg.
There's an example, but try using browsershots to see if you are actually happy with the support of browsers (IE for example does not have native svg support).
Me personally have decided not to use svg, rather implement images + js solution as I don't think svg is supported enough nowadays.
Related
I'm considering creating all the reports of a series of desktop business apps directly to html. Most of the reports are tables (maybe compound reports), headers, footers, etc. (no images, vector graphics, etc.).
After a search in SO, I've read lots of post regarding problems with page breaks and things like that (I don't need pixel positioning at all, but yes control at page breaks).
For example, let's say I have a big table with currency values and I need the last row of the table per page to display the running totals at that point.. it is something feasible to do easily or I will run in lots of trouble?
What technologies can help me here?
HTML5
Javascript
CSS
PHP Librarys
JQuery
Some notes:
The html will be displayed with the chrome or firefox engine embeded, so the diferences between browsers it's not a problem for me.
I can have the php preprocessor embedded if that helps to generate more easily the reports, I'm just looking fot the best technology at hand to make the work well..
I'm tired of report generators with "WYSIWYG" designers (Crystal Report, FastReport, ReportBuilder, etc.)
Thanks!
We made the exact move you're thinking about almost a year ago and haven't looked back. Most communication with our client is over the web, so it's been a perfect fit. They can view html outputs easily on our website, and can generate pdf's of the page (server side) whenever necessary. The program we use for pdf conversion is a free, easy-to-use, open-source project called wkhtmltopdf.
Where we are is great, but getting here was difficult.
Deciding which pdf engine to use was a long, painful process. The short of it is that HTML is for viewing pages on the internet, not for viewing pages on paper. Page-breaks will be the bane of your existence in this game -- you literally have to measure each page and create your own clean-looking breaks for every single report (otherwise, all html-to-pdf converters out there will just keep rendering the document onto the next page as it if encountered no page-break at all). Further complicating the matter is that every html-to-pdf engine out there handles this sh*t differently and you'll have to write a tailored solution to test each one to see if it meets your individual needs.
Now, the good news:
You can save yourself a lot of trouble by heeding my advice and going with wkhtmltopdf for your finalized reporting outputs. This little program is simply amazing -- it uses a webkit engine, renders CSS/javascript accurately, has header/footer control, optionally creates a table-of-contents page, and (most importantly) consistently produces excellent looking pdf's without having to customize your code base. It also has a variety of great command line switches, and it is very, very fast. I say again: it is very, very fast.
Best of all, it's a command line tool that can be used in batch processing. And did I mention that it's really, really fast?
Browser support for printing is generally terrible. However, there are other tools, notably Prince (which is not free) and Flying Saucer (which is free) that can generate PDF output from XML/HTML plus CSS. Prince even supports JavaScript though I don't have any experience with it.
I've got a Java back end in my current application, so for me Flying Saucer works fine for simple reports. I pre-process an HTML template with FreeMarker and then run the result through Flying Saucer. It's got a surprisingly smart rendering engine.
The CSS3 Paged Media spec (well, proposed spec) has all sorts of cool stuff in it but they're almost totally unimplemented in the browsers. Even the CSS2 paged media stuff is only supported half-heartedly.
Speaking of Prince, you might look into DocRaptor. DocRaptor is another HTML to PDF conversion application. It uses Prince XML, and handles CSS better than comparable programs.
It isn't free, but offers a free 30 day trial for all accounts, so there's no harm in trying it out, at least.
DocRaptor
I'm thinking about setting up a website (based on WordPress) to host video tutorials on interpreting CT scans.
In addition to simply letting the visitor view PowerPoint presentation videos, I'm keen on writing some sort of simple app that I can embed in the blog to allow the visitor to scroll through a series of images (i.e. a scan).
I usually code in REALbasic or Objective-C. I have some experience with PHP. What are my language options for making an interactive embeddable image viewer in a blog? The website needs to be able to be viewed on an iPad as well as normal desktop browsers.
Javascript.
Pick up jQuery, or a similar Javascript framework. It will help you get down to business faster.
What you are asking has nothing to do with server-side coding. It is all client-side. Because of that, your choices are something to do with a plugin (such as Flash), or Javascript. If you want it to work on an iPad, Flash and other plugins are out.
Since you need your image viewer to work on the iPad, ActionScript3, hence, Flash is out of the picture. I would use JavaScript as per the examples on the Apple HTML5 advocacy site, using the canvas element to render the viewer.
I would lean towards a javascript solution. There are loads of libraries out there that will give you a kickstart. If you know some example works of what you are thinking about doing, we can give you pros and cons for serverside vs. client side languages. Additionally, you can use html5 for a lot, but then again it depends on what exactly you are wanting to do.
I need some opinions on using PHP to make completely "scalable" websites.. For instance, using viewport resolution and resizing images, applying dynamic css styles..... In my mind doing this just add's to the complexity and should not be done, it should be fixed or fluid using strictly css and no server-side languages to generate layouts based on the device size..
I need some input and maybe some philosophy on why using this approach is not used at all..
Manipulating a web page in this way is the domain of CSS controlled by Javascript (or a library such as JQuery, see CSS docs). You shouldn't be wasting your server's processor cycles when client-side implementations will be far more responsive for the user and allow all the flexibility you require. Changing font size etc can be done almost instantly in the browser without the user having to request another page from your (remote) server, which would result in a slower user experience.
Really, really DON'T
As Andy says it is the domain of CSS.
Trying to adapt a design with PHP will make your code unmaintainable. You should really learn to use CSS efficiently to avoid this kind of hack.
The only reason for which you could use PHP to detect browser and adapt content is mobile browser.
Given the number of the existing User Agent tokens, it'll be almost impossible to make y scalable websites.
I'm working with SmartOptimizer: minify js and css, use css data uris, add far expire headers and other features. (http://farhadi.ir/works/smartoptimizer) It works fine, but i don't know if exists a similiar application with similar or best tools (like Google Closure, CSScaffold,..)
If you're not sure witch is better, what's your favourite??
Thanks for reading, sorry for my english
YSlow ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ ) will tell you where you can optimize, at least, though it won't solve your problems for you.
WEB optimizer(http://webo.name/) is a great thing. It can not only find issues, but also do some optimizing. However it isn't free for commercial use.
I have a JS and CSS compressor into my editor (Coda.app), and I optimise images with ImageOptim.app. You just have to drag & drop the images, and the app does his job by choosing the best compression throwing it at multiple images libraries.
Note: MAC only
I've recently bumped into facelift, an alternative to sIFR and I was wondering if those who have experience with both sIFR and FLIR could shed some light on their experience with FLIR.
For those of you who've not yet read about how FLIR does it, FLIR works by taking the text from targeted elements using JavaScript to then make calls to a PHP app that uses PHP's GD to render and return transparent PNG images that get placed as background for the said element, where the overflow is then set to hidden and padding is applied equal to the elements dimensions to effectively push the text out of view.
This is what I've figured so far:
The good
No flash (+for mobiles)
FLIR won't break the layout
Images range from some 1KB (say one h3 sentence) to 8KB (very very large headline)
Good documentation
Easy to implement
Customizable selectors
Support for jQuery/prototype/scriptaculous/mooTools
FLIR has implemented cache
Browsers cache the images themselves!
The bad
Text can't be selected
Requests are processed from all sources (you need to restrict FLIR yourself to process requests from your domain only)
My main concerns are about how well does it scale, that is, how expensive is it to work with the GD library on a shared host, does anyone have experience with it?; second, what love do search engines garner for sIFR or FLIR implementations knowing that a) text isn't explicitly hidden b) renders only on a JavaScript engine.
Over the long term, sIFR should cache better because rendering is done on the client side, from one single Flash movie. Flash text acts more like browser text than an image, and it's easy to style the text within Flash (different colors, font weights, links, etc). You may also prefer the quality of text rendered in Flash, versus that rendered by the server side image library. Another advantage is that you don't need any server side code.
Google has stated that sIFR is OK, since it's replacing HTML text by the same text, but rendered differently. I'd say the same holds true for FLIR.
I know that with sIFR, and I assume with FLIR that you perform your markup in the same way as usual, but with an extra class tag or similar, so it can find the text to replace. Search engines will still read the markup as regular text so that shouldn't be an issue.
Performance-wise: if you're just using this for headings (and they're not headings which will change each page load), then the caching of the images in browsers, and also presumably on the server's disk should remove any worries about performance. Just make sure you set up your HTTP headers correctly!
since FLIR is IMAGES and sIFR is flash i would imagine that it would be a bit more resource intensive to use sIFR. I havent run any tests but it seems logical.
Search engines search sIFR better than FLIR because some search engines can go into the text of a flash document
I don't know much about sIFR because FLIR worked, and it "felt" better to me than Flash. Just looking at the sIFR 3 beta demo page I noticed that it doesn't seem to react to browser preference text resizing. That is, I increase my font-size in Firefox (ctrl-+) and reload the page, the headings stay the same size.
To those who know sIFR, is this an actual limitation of the script or did they just do the demo page wrong?
If it actually doesn't handle this, I'd call that a major advantage for FLIR, which does work this way. People with impaired vision who don't use screen readers probably don't appreciate that the text doesn't resize to their preference.
That said, from a quick glance at sIFR's API, you should be able to make resized text work in sIFR. I'd consider it a bug to be fixed, not an essential disadvantage of the method.
Woff files is the best solution.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator