I felt like coding today, so I put together a little hack from an idea I have had for a while. What I came up with is a web search (powered by Google), that loads new search results as you scroll the page down. Try it, it’s actually pretty cool.
Here is how it works: there is a large div element at the bottom of the page just to take up space. When it comes onto the screen, an ajax request is made to the server to get the next 10 results from Google. The requests are made through Google’s SOAP api, which is no longer available, but I had an old API key so I was able to get it to work. I had all the client stuff working within an hour, but Google’s API took a while to figure out. Google uses SOAP, which is powerful but hard to code for compared to a simple GET API. It took me a couple of hours to get the server-side stuff working but it is still a hack, so don’t be surprised if you get an error or some unexpected behaviour.
It was designed for FireFox/Mozilla browsers. The only other browser I have tried it with is IE, which it does not work with. So if you are using Internet Explorer, you won’t see anything interesting.
Try it here
There have been a few times - and there will certainly be more - where I need to generate a calendar through JavaScript. Although there are a few good open-source JavaScript calendars out there, there is always a trade-off between flexibility and simplicity. The goal of popCalendar was to maximize flexibility without compromising simplicity. To do this, it is built in a modular way so that it can be extended, but it is still simple to use.
Currently, there is only one component: the calendar itself. In a future release, I will add a component to allow the calendar to be used as a date input for a text input.
It is still in beta, but in my brief testing I didn’t find any bugs. Here are some links if you are interested in using it for yourself (see readme.txt for license):
Last weekend, I won a nice new Toshiba laptop in a local software competition. My entry was a web-based fractal explorer. I had a lot of fun making it, and it is fun to play with as well. I have decided to release it under an open-source license so that other people can play around with it (see the download link at the bottom of this post).
Unfortunately, I do not have access to a powerful Tomcat server with a lot of bandwidth, so I can’t host an online demo. If anyone has the resources and is interested in hosting it, please let me know.
Here are some screenshots of the application in action:
Since it is a web-based application, any supported web browser can be the client (see the documentation for a list of supported browsers; any modern Gecko-based browser is supported as well as IE and Opera.) The client interface is loosely based on Google Maps. The server is a Java Servlet run through Tomcat. You can read more about how it works in the documentation.
Downloads:
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