Browser handling of broken includes in an Ajax world?

In this mordern web 2.0 age, javascript includes are used more and more - and in some cases solutions often depend on included content from 3rd parties. While it is nice these 3rd parties may provide us with data (such as the latest tweets from twitter), it would be quite nice, if issues on their server didn’t break the fancy page we’re building.

So the question is this: If you build a page and include javascript from foreign scripts, will error messages on their part break your site? We’ve made the assumption, that the Web2.0 page will degrade gracefully, so that the content/functionality of the javascript-includes is just extra frosting, not needed to use the page

Building image tags with jquery

Like tables, jQuery also allows you to play around with all other tags. In a recent project, we wanted to change a fixed set of labels/texts into icons instead. For this challenge jQuery was used to build the new image tag, and for good measure, here is a small example of how you can build an image tag - including alt-text and click-event.

The basic code for building and inserting an image into the DOM looks like this:

jQuery and tables

I’ve been playing with jQuery the recent weeks, and while it is reasonable simple to get started with and the jQuery documentation is pretty good, I thought I’d share a few snippets of jquery examples/code, which showcases a few simple practical uses for jquery.

First up - tables and jquery.

With jQuery you can add content to a HTML table. Here are to simple examples on how to add content into a table.

Flight Control

flight-control

I really like simple games, which you can play where ever you are - and which still has enough challenges to be interesting for quite a while. One of the best games I’ve played for a long time is Flight Control for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The game was developed by Firemint.

It’s a fairly simple game. You’re in control of an Airport and all you have to do is make sure the planes land at the runways. To do this you simply draw their designated paths on the screen. There are 4 different aircrafts - helicopters, propeller planes, small jets and large jets. As you play more planes concurrently enters the airspace - and eventually it gets quite busy and avoiding mid-air collisions a challenge.

Better but Broken

Working with application development - either on the web, on the desktop or any other place - is often quite interesting. When making new releases features are added, changed - or in rare cases removed.

As a developer - or “software product manager” - it must be an interesting challenge to keep up with the users and the market to capture the features and changes to a product, which will make it better from release to release.