Teaching an "old" dog, new tricks

OK, I'm not a fantastic Web Dev and tbh there are gaps in my learning, i know enough to get me by and produce some reasonable stuff.

This project has made me have to take a step back and at the same time, take a step up. Today i have learned that to make a web page you do not need to put ANY html in it at all.... this was some what of a daunting concept, since my learning is centre around traditional HTML/CSS etc. So now we throw in OOP PHP... well as Darren Stephens will attest to, i was some what perplex/confused/down right Stupefied!

OOP (for people that do not know) stands for Object Orientated Programming. In first year of my BSc we touched on this and if I'm honest i fell over at the first attempt.. i simply was not very good at it. i have struggled to grasp the concept of OOP ever since. to my surprise i manged to explain to a non Programmer how OOP works (in an abstract context)

I told martin (one of the Players on my pool team) that OOP works something like this:

A house is a OBJECT
A house has windows which is a CLASS with in the object
A window has ATTRIBUTES like size colour
A window has METHODS like Open close
A window can have an INSTANCE of the class, so Stained glass is different type of Window but still falls in the class of window.

he got the jist of it, but tbh i wasn't 100% sure if i was right about it, but i digress.

the following is a snippet of Code from the wild project html Client page:

Coorrrrreecctiiioonnnn i was going to, but basically Blogger wont let me and i could not find any thing in the help pages to change this...

I'll be back later with Screenshots...

a disgruntled ~Keith

EDIT

Told you i would be back! Ok our HTML code samples:

in here you can see the standard HTML is present and the php function for connecting to a database and calling a query.

Ok now this is the same code in OOP PHP:

In the words of a favorate Character of mine "It not even sound same!"

Amusing Interface Quirks!

I have spent a few days building templates for the interface for wild. I have found a few things that amuse me with Mozilla FireFox and IE (7/8). I will show you what I mean shortly but first i want to talk interface!

Client:

Originally I envisaged the client being to different interfaces (one for high end devices, one for mobile devices)

But after some tweaking I feel that we might be able to work the larger interface for the mobile devices, simply because of the way the browsers (IE and Firefox) scale the web page:

moving on...

Tutor:

In the previous post I stated that I wish to move away from the traditional web page. its hard for me to explain what I mean but I am going to give it ago.

My idea is to make the web interface feel and work like something you would have in a kiosk or information booth, for instance the interface will not have a navigation bar, in the traditional sense. Also all navigation will happen within an area of the page (a bit like frames but not as evil) and will be in sequence or will be fluent (so one option will lead on to the next until completion).

So I went about creation the tutor interface to mirror the client. The thing I found this was the Scale effect for the tutor client became annoying and I mean REALLY annoying. If I where a lecturer or a teacher, I think I would of being seriously narked with the thing and ditched it.

After this, I decided to set the whole thing as absolute positioning with in the CSS (some people say this is a no no, well to you I :P ) the interface looks and feels a lot neater with this and I have give it some scalability for different browser sizes, I might have also fallen in the trap of creating for 1024X768 but then we cant change this at a later stage.



Display:

the display page was really a no brainer, its just a simple page that displays the data. i had little problems with setting this up.

Right the browser quirks:

as daft as it sounds there is one little quirk that i have noticed;

Firefox:

IE:

I'm using a reset CSS file.... but still it happens... love IE!

~Keith

Creating Functions and Beating Web Servers

1st week of sprint one of the wild project, has seen one of the main parts of the project near completion.

DM and KD Set about and successfully get the add-in for PowerPoint to a working standard (all credit to DM for been so persistent with VBA). DM created an add-in that creates a web browser on the slide, with an invisible text box to enter the URL into. The web browser, on slide change, then takes the URL and displays in the slide show with out the need for a click or action.

On to the web interface/server. KD has created some designs of the interface (which you can view in the documentation, they are pink, but he swears they are light blue on his laptop. KD has also started the functions needed to add activities and other data to the database. KD Wrote them in MySQL but there will be some form of conversion to Postgres also, DS was looking at using the DBX extension in PHP, but currently the installation does not work.

KD has spent a few days trying to install a working web server on to his laptop and to his dismay found that his laptop needs a format. Since previous installs have effected the installation of the PHP ( it cannot find the extentions).

The team are now moving into the second week of the sprint with a view to have the basic system in place. They want:
• the add-in working (check)
• the interface in a basic form(check)
• the interface to take input and store it the database
• the server to generate the client slide interface

The next week (the 2nd week of sprint 1) they will be looking for the response data return and display the response on the embedded slide.