Beginner's guide on qooxdoo

Rich Internet Application (RIA) provides the capability to deliver feature-rich web applications, enables you to develop web applications with most of the desktop application's characteristics, and improves the usability of the web application. Over the last few years, many frameworks have arrived and are available to develop the Rich Internet Applications in different technologies.

qooxdoo is one of the comprehensive open source RIA frameworks. qooxdoo allows you to develop cross-browser RIAs in object-oriented JavaScript, which helps greatly to re-use application code, and hence reduces the application size. It provides a wide range of off-the-shelf UI widgets. qooxdoo comes with a rich feature set when compared to most of the other RIA frameworks. qooxdoo is completely based on JavaScript. It provides a variety of tools to build, optimize, generate documentation, and more. qooxdoo framework supports multiple browsers, multi-language deployment, custom look and feel, unit testing, automation testing, and much more.

In the past few years, all the major Internet applications or enterprise applications have been developed or migrated to RIA to support all the features that are provided in the desktop applications. This helps the organizations to keep the customers happy and also improves application deployment and maintenance.

qooxdoo is an open source framework. It has been there since 2005 and it is a quite stable framework now. If you are watching and waiting for the right time to migrate your application to qooxdoo, this is the right time, in my opinion. Now, there is a beginner's guide on qooxdoo to jumpstart your development on Qooxdoo.
http://www.packtpub.com/qooxdoo-for-rich-internet-applications-beginners-guide/book

Requirements - What Vs How

When you get a request to add a feature for the product, you focus on the problem and ask what the user wants rather than how they want it. Most of the times, you'll hear "how they want". Realizing what is the actual problem will enable you to provide a better and cleaner solution than their expectation.

Sleep Vs Quality Sleep

Normally I hear people saying "You should have quality sleep". I didn't actually feel and experience that until last week. Few months back, I replaced my zero watts bulb (Apparently it is 12 watts bulb, check out here). Earlier I had Blue colored one, But I got the plain colored one as a replacement. I replaced the bulb and everything was fine. I normally switch on that bulb during the night and sleep. Initially I didn't realize any change, But in the later days, I realized that even if I sleep for 8+ hours, my eyes were straining during the day time. I thought it may be due to the tiredness of work, travel on Bangalore roads etc. One day I suddenly realized that long long ago, someone told me that my eyes are open slightly during my sleep. I started thinking on those lines and realized the plain colored zero watt bulb provides more light during the night. As I normally open my eyes slightly during sleep, I guess I strained my eyes during the sleep by closing it forcefully to avoid the light, which is the root cause. Then, I switched off the zero watt bulb and slept for few days, the quality of sleep improved a lot and now I sleep at least by 1 hour less than what I used to sleep before, get up early without alarm and my eyes doesn't strain during the day time. So, I really felt the quality sleep :)

Now, I started researching about further improving the quality of my sleep by thinking and discussing with friends. Following mind map conveys all about getting quality sleep.

Microsoft Word shortcut keys

If you use certain tools/software frequently, it is good to know useful shortcuts. This will help you save much time and enables you to prepare the artifacts very quickly if you are aware of the content ofcourse.

As we use word quite often, It is good to know the shortcuts at Microsoft word shortcuts

HTML Select - Does not scale well ? Optimize it to Scale.

I had huge data in some scenario and ended up displaying 25000 options in HTML select. It was really slow to render the HTML select, especially in IE. Ideal way to resolve this issue to redesign the screen to avoid huge data in select element. Considering the release cycle, changes at multiple places, test coverage, user documentation change, etc, I tried to analyze the root cause of the issue. When you create each Option object and add it to Select element in java script for such a large number of options, browser spends lot of time doing the string concatenation underneath. Especially IE is very poor in performing such tasks. Even while clearing the 25000 options, it takes quite some time. To improve the performance, I re-wrote the code as mentioned below:

Normal way but non-performing code:

    var selectedValue;
    var selectElement;

    selectElement.length = 0; // clear the options
    var len = 0;   
    for (i=0; i<=25000; i++)
    {
         selectElement.options[len] = new Option(i, i);
       
         if ( selectedValue != null && i == selectedValue)
         {
             selectElement.options[len].selected = true;
         }
         len++;
    } 

Optimized code: