JavaScript Application Cookbook

JavaScript Approaches in These Applications

Those are the basics. You’ll see that I incorporated a couple of these strategies in the applications in this book. I should also mention the JavaScript approaches, or coding conventions. That’ll give you a better idea of where I’m coming from, and whether the approaches will work for you.

The first thing I did when considering an application was to decide whether your (and my) web site visitors might have any use for it. Each application solves one or more basic problems. Searching, emailing, online help, setting personal preferences, testing or gathering information, creating image rollovers, and so on are fairly common features that web surfers like. If a potential application didn’t pass the justification test, I didn’t spend any time on it.

The next thing I did was to decide whether JavaScript could pull off the functionality I wanted. This was pretty easy. If the answer was yes, then I went for it. If not, it was into the JavaScript landfill.

Once I singled out an application, it was off to the text editor. Here are some of the conventions I used for the codes.

Reuse as Much Code as Possible

This is where JavaScript source files come into play. That is, these applications make use of the JavaScript source files loaded in using the following syntax:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1" SRC="someJSFile.js"></SCRIPT>

someJSFile.js contains code that can be used by multiple scripts—any one that uses the above syntax. Many of the applications ...