Jumploader is a very cool very powerful uploading agent. It is a java applet that runs in your browser that allows you to upload very large files by breaking them up into ‘partitions’ (small sections of a file). It has other neat features such as drag and drop files, image editing, meta data forms and file compression. The responsibility on the developers side is handling the file uploads with server side scripting of some kind. It works with pretty much any server side language such as PHP, .net, Python etc… Anything that can run in a web server and write to a file stream. I’ve worked with this recently in .net. There is an open source example of how to use Jumploader with C# on their website originally written by Michael Wright. It isn’t updated however and it was missing some key features that I needed such as examples on how to handle the ‘resume’ feature, allowing for the meta data forms and a few other things. I made several updates to the original code and have started an open source project on Google Project. You can visit the project at http://code.google.com/p/jlnetwrapper/. I will be updating this periodically and am always happy for other contributions to this project as well.
I have recently been using LINQ to accomplish much of my data abstraction and have found it very useful for building a robust ASP.Net application. Ultimately what LINQ to SQL does is it translates your C# code into a SQL query and returns an object or an object list instead of a dataset. This can be much easier to deal with than a dataset. I have run into a couple things that I didn’t expect so I thought I’d share. Read the rest of this entry »
I ran into an interesting problem today when trying to call a stored procedure from a linked server ‘Server not configured for RPC’. SQL 2000 uses RPC (Remote Procedural Calls) which is basically XML representing Objects on the server. The linked in server must be configured to handle this and by default SQL 2000 servers are not. It’s very simple to setup though all you need do is run the following:
exec sp_serveroption @server='servername/IP', @optname='rpc', @optvalue='true' exec sp_serveroption @server='servername/IP', @optname='rpc out', @optvalue='true'
or you can go into your enterprise manager or SQL studio, right click on the Linked server and select ‘Server Options’ and select ‘True’ for ‘RPC’ and ‘RPC Out’.
I’ve recently worked on an application that required a mobile (iphone/Android) to quickly search through data and do it in such a way that it fits the dimensions of the iPhone/Android Phone. One of the great things about Android and iPhone is the fact that both operating systems use safari webkit as their web browser. It is a slimmed down version however it has a lot of the same features as the full blown safari web browser. That being the case, building a web application for the iPhone is also building a web app for the Android phone too. iPhone and Android, however, suffer from the same ailment… Dimensions. Yes it’s true you can browse the web and see websites and it looks almost exactly the same as it does on your desktop PC (minus things like flash), but the problem you run into is that to see the entire website, the browser must shrink the webpage to the point at which you can no longer read the text until you zoom in. Then the content goes off in all directions off the viewable area of the screen and you must drag your screen in each direction to view the content. Fine for a regular website. Not so fine for an application in which you must interact with the content. Most native applications for the iPhone have a prescribed look and feel about them that does a great job making it easy to interact with the area of the screen that you have to work with on the iPhone. A great way of making an iPhone web app is to mimic that same look and feel in a web browser. So how do we do this?
Recently I’ve been working through some optimizations to some code and realized that there are alot of programmers who don’t know some programming best practices. There is alot to do with the performance of a program with how the programmer wrote it. Here are some things to concider:
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I just wrote a new post (http://www.zonkio.com/the-javascript-injection-problem_685.html) on Zonkio. The post is about the dangers of javascript injection and understanding good coding practices when dealing with client server architecture.
At Qorvis we have just released it"s newest iPhone application for the inauguration. Features include:
- - How many steps you are away from the capitol
- - Where are the nearest ZAGAT rated restaurants from where you currently are
- - Where are the nearest metro lines and when will the next metro train be coming through
- - A list of events going on around you, how far are they from your current location, and how to get there
and much more. Here is a news release (among many) that we have done:
PointAbout featured on ABC News from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.
You can find out more about this application by going to http://qorvis.com/inauguration/
Something every web developer has to do a lot is redirecting your web page to another location. For PHP developers it usually looks like this:
< ?php header('Location: http://www.mylocation.com'); ?>
This works well enough as long as headers have not been sent. A common mistake for PHP developers is to use ob_start() to put all content into the output buffer. This can be useful for other functions such as compression, but it’s not a good habit to get into just to compensate for sloppy code. Here is a simple little function that can help redirect using multiple methods.
A simple function that we need every once in awhile is to download a file. The problem sometimes is that there are numerous amounts of browser plugins that will open the file within the browser itself instead of opening the browsers download manager and downloading the file to the hard disk such as microsoft IE’s office plugin that will display an excel spreadsheet or word document in the browser itself. Here’s a simple function that will send http headers to your browser and tell it to download the file instead of running in the browser.
Eclipse PDT has been around for awhile now and keeps getting better and better. Especially with their new powerful PDT 2.0 release. It has all the great features that the 1.x version had such as debugging in Zend or Xdebug, syntax highlighting, code completion and project outlining. However as this is a new release there are alot of new and improved features.