Goodies to Go ™
March 4, 2002–Newsletter #170
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Announcement Goodies
Mentor Spotlight
– Ryan Flynn – HTML Mentor
I have a Computer Science degree from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.
I have worked for several companies as a web site/application developer. I
currently live and work in Rapid City, SD as a Data Processing Assistant and
Systems Administrator at Behavior Management Systems.
I am experienced in HTML, JavaScript and VBScript. I also have good knowledge
of programming in C++ and Java. A few sites that I have helped develop are
UncleFed.com,
http://www.MortgageDataWeb.com and
BehaviorManagement.org. I am currently the webmaster of
BehaviorManagement.org.
Goodies Thoughts – ASP.NET – Worth the effort?
Recently I have had a chance to sit
down and work with the new ASP.NET technology from Microsoft. So, I thought I
would take an issue or two to share some of my experiences and impressions thus
far.
So, what exactly is .NET? Well,
Microsoft says it is a whole new way of thinking and they weren’t kidding. The
idea behind .NET is that everything works together in a much more cohesive way.
How does it work? Whatever language you choose to program in, Visual Basic, COBOL,
C++, C# or any other supported language, the code you write gets compiled into
an IL (intermediate language). For example, if I wrote an application in C# and
you wrote an application with the exact same features in COBOL.NET, the IL that
your code and my code gets compiled down to should be virtually identical even
though we are using two totally different languages. Once your code is compiled
into the IL, that IL is taken and compiled again down to Machine Code (the base
language of the computer). Therefore, everything available to you in COBOL.NET
is also available to me in C#. The choice of scripting language now is pure
preference.
So, what does this have to do with
the web? Well, if you are writing HTML only and have no desire to add ASP type
interactivity to your webs then it really doesn’t effect you. However, if you
use or plan to use ASP on your sites it has a big impact. With ASP.NET you can
now use any .NET language that you are comfortable with like those listed above.
This means that ASP.NET is much more powerful now that you aren’t limited to the
scaled down scripting languages (VBScript and JavaScript).
Has ASP itself changed? Yep, it sure
has. In creating my new ASP.NET pages I found that many of the things that I had
become used to doing in ASP no longer applied. It required a whole lot less
coding in ASP.NET to accomplish the same sorts of tasks. On the flip side, it
required learning a whole new way of doing and thinking about my common ASP
tasks.
Many of the tasks that used to
require going back and forth from the server to the browser are no longer the
case. Now, a great many things run on the server in real time using Web Form
Controls instead of using the standard HTML web forms <INPUT …>.
This has some very distinct
advantages. For example, when a person is entering information on a form you can
check their input as they go giving them immediate feedback on mistakes. You can
react to a bunch of different events such as changing the selection in a drop
down list box. You can perform immediate calculations every time the user
changes the contents of a text box.
Can’t I do the same kinds of things
in JavaScript? I many cases, yes you can but ASP.NET does make it a whole lot simpler and it
even automatically adapts to the browser environment it is running in.
So, is it worth learning? Absolutley.
If you are interested in producing more interactive websites it is definitely
worth checking out. Obviously, ASP.NET won’t be for everyone but it is worth a
look.
Will it be difficult to learn? That’s
going to totally depend on the person. Using ASP.NET is definitely a whole
different ballgame, it’s almost a different sport altogether. I would suggest
picking up an introductory book like
ASP.NET for Dummies and reading
through at least the first half of the book. If you finish and have a splitting
headache and you feel disoriented then ASP.NET is probably not for you. For
those of you who are already ASP developers, you may want to check out these
books as well: ASP.NET Tips, Tutorials and Code from SAMS and
Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days also from SAMS.
If you are already an ASP developer
or have done some ASP work in the past your transition may actually be more
difficult than if you started learning ASP.NET from the ground up. With ASP.NET you will have to forget and relearn several common
tasks. In the long run, tough, learning ASP.NET will definitely make you more
productive even though it may not seem that way as you begin climbing that
learning curve.
In the next issue we will look as
some specific examples of how ASP and ASP.NET are different.
Thanks for reading!
Quiz Goodies
Let’s say you have a second window
that you want to pop-up but you want it to pop-up one minute after the home page
loads. How would you set the delay in JavaScript?
Q & A Goodies
Q. Do you know of anywhere
where I could find an easy tutorial for PHP?
A. Here’s a couple of sites
you might want to check out:
hotwired.lycos.com —
excellent beginner’s tutorial, read this first.
hotwired.lycos.com
— pretty good intro tutorial on PHP & MySQL.
www.onlamp.com
— O’Reilly publishers’ PHP section, always
high quality tutorials and articles here.
www.devshed.com — mostly, but not exclusively,
advanced tutorials.
www.php.net – the manual
page is indispensable, so I thought I’d
mention that too.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Rich Barton, one of our PHP Mentors.
Q. I have defined the frames
like this:
<frameset cols="20%,80%" frameborder="0" framespacing="0" border="0">
<frame src="left.html" name="left" marginwidth=0 border=0 noresize>
<frame src="home.html" name="right" marginwidth=0> </frameset>
Since I added (w3c recommendation) the following information to my right
frame (IE6.0):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
I have the problem that the vertical scrolling bar of the right frame
doesn’t disappear, even if the content isn’t larger than the available
space.(for exampe 60 lines of blah<br>blah) It only disappears if the
content does also fit the frame in height.
How can I make the vertical scroll bar appear only if the content is
larger than the frame?
A. Try setting the scrolling
attribute as such:
<frame src="left.html" name="left" marginwidth=0 border=0 noresize
scrolling="no"> <frame src="home.html" name="right" marginwidth=0
scrolling="auto">
You can set it to yes, no, or auto. Auto will put the scrollbar on the page only
if the content goes off the page.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Ryan Flynn, one of our HTML Mentors.
Q. You may remember the one of
the questions in the Q & A section in issue 165. You said that you used server
side includes to handle different parts of your site that are common to pages.
However, the extensions of the pages in your website are .html, not .asp. So,
how can they work? I know that they only work if the page extensions are asp.
The html pages are discarded for processing. So, the question is, how do you
make it work in pages with html extension.
A. You can include pages like
this:
<!–#include virtual="yourfolder/yourpage.html"
–>
This works only if your web server is
configured to recognize the #include. Basically what happens is the server has
to read through your page and look for any instances of #include, get the
appropriate files and insert them into your page. Because ASP pages are
interpreted, the server effectively "reads" every page before it sends the page
to the browser. With HTML that’s not necessarily the case. In the case of HTML
pages the server usually just finds the page and then sends it on its merry way
not caring what its contents are. You will have to check with your host provider
or server administrator to see if #include is available to you in HTML pages.
Also, be careful when including
pages. If you try to combine pages and end up with multiple <head> and <body>
tags, for example, you will confuse the heck out of the browser.
News Goodies
Have you been wondering whether
learning to program in a scripting language is right for you and where to begin?
Click here to read the article
We talked about ASP.NET in this issue
of the newsletter. Do a little comparison shopping with Java 2 in this article.
Click here to read the article
Alright, for all you Mac fans out
there Apple has just released its first 1GHz machine. With the newly designed
iMac and more powerful G4, Apple is working hard to make you want to be a Mac
owner.
Click here to read the article
Quiz Answer
You would use SetTimeout(). This
allows you to set a delay (in milliseconds) before a function is called.
For example:
SetTimeout(OpenWindowFunction(),60000);
The above example would delay calling
OpenWindowFunction for 60000 milliseconds which is the equivalent of 1 minute.
And Remember This . . .
Have you ever heard of the name
Fibonacci? In the early 13th century he invented a number sequence that goes
like this – 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 etc. It is simply a series of numbers where each
number is the sum of the previous two numbers, except for the first two of
course. He originally came up with the sequence to explain the breeding rate of
rabbits but found that the sequence applied to a great many other things in
nature. For example, if you count the clockwise and counterclockwise spirals of
seeds in the head of a sunflower you will find the Fibonacci numbers.
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!