Archive for the ‘jQuery’ Category

Changing variables using a web interface and embedded HTTP server

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

When walking around during the Boston Regional, I had been talking to some people about code, and they mentioned that LabView was great because they could tune their PID controllers on the fly while the robot was operating. So I thought to myself, “why can’t I do this with C++?”. And… so I did. WebDMA was created to allow our FIRST Robotics team to tune our robot in an easy to use and intuitive way via any modern web browser.

Using C++ operator overloading, WebDMA provides proxy objects that your application can use as normal variables which can be manipulated or displayed by your application via a configurable jQuery/javascript powered Web 2.0 interface hosted by an lightweight embedded web server.

Despite that WebDMA was specifically created for use in FIRST Robotics on the NI-cRio/vxWorks platform, it uses the Boost ASIO portable networking library and Boost Thread portable threads library and is usable on any platform supported by these Boost libraries (tested on Boost 1.38, requires a patch for vxWorks).

A non-functional (but very shiny) demo of the interface is available at http://www.virtualroadside.com/botface/index.html

Visit the Google Code project site for WebDMA

Update: Go here for a video: http://www.virtualroadside.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/25/webdma-demo-video/

Obsessive Web Statistics: Open Source Web 2.0 Website Statistics System

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

For the last month or so, I’ve been working on a new PHP/MySQL/jQuery web application that I’ve decided to call “Obsessive Web Statistics” (OWS). A project has been created on Sourceforge for it, and I’m happy to finally announce the first file release for OWS! There are a number of features about OWS that give it an advantage over existing website statistics software.

Instead of generating static HTML reports like most website statistics programs, OWS takes your Apache logfiles and puts them into a MySQL database. A dynamic jQuery driven interface with a PHP backend allows you to manipulate the data and display it in useful ways. The interface is mostly intuitive and simple to use while providing powerful options to manipulate the data. For more information, you can visit the Sourceforge page or subscribe to the obsessive-compulsive mailing list (how crazy of a name is that? LoL. FYI: Its only about development and help for OWS) . Archived version of the list is available at Sourceforge as well.

Links:

Sourceforge website: http://obsessive.sourceforge.netΒ 

Demo Site: http://ows.mattas.net/Β 

Many thanks to my friend Tony Mattas (http://www.mattas.net) for providing hosting for the OWS demo site!

jQuery snippet:

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Here is a neat jQuery snippet that you can use to create extra elements in a form, underneath (mostly) the previous element. Took longer than it should have to create this since I didn’t quite understand the behavior of “before” and “after”… ie, a parent node has to exist for them to work.

<input name="field[]" type="text" /> <a href="#" onclick="$(this). before('<br/>'). before($(this). prev(). prev(). clone()); return false;" href="" >+</a>

This snippet works especially well inside of a table. πŸ™‚ Unfortunately, I don’t have a demo of the code since I don’t have jQuery enabled on this blog.. yet. πŸ™‚

Visual jQuery: Awesome jQuery Reference

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

This is seriously the coolest form of documentation that I’ve seen. Implemented using jQuery by jQuery developer Yehuda Katz, Visual jQuery implements the API documentation for jQuery using an expanding tree of categorized nodes. Its quite innovative, IMHO. If you develop using jQuery, definitely a plus to have around. And, there is a downloadable copy of it available too. πŸ™‚

http://www.visualjquery.com/

jQuery rocks

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Have you used jQuery yet? I know its been around for awhile, but I’ve only recently been using it. Of course, there are other similar javascript frameworks out there. jQuery makes javascript development ‘fun’, according to the website, and I would definitely agree. It makes so many mundane things way easy and quick to do. If you aren’t using it for your web applications, I’d definitely recommend it. I’m using it in my LOLCats generator demo page, and in my website stats analysis program (which will be formally announced and released in the near future), and it definitely allows you to do some really crazy things quickly.

http://www.jquery.com/