Flashmech

I love to evangelise about tools, frameworks or books that had aided me in my course of work. After my recent project, I feel the need to write this post about jQuery to spread the love that it had given me.

It was simply too impressive; jQuery opened up the world of client-side scripting for HTML for me after investing just a day to learn about the language’s selectors. What followed was just referring to the documentation, coding out the desired, and the magic happened!

May I add that it had been 5 years since the last time I touched JavaScript too, and the only ones that I used back then were downloaded from Dynamic Drive.

To me, jQuery is a language that made a whole lot of sense, hid away the extraneous that normal JavaScript requires, and so all that is left is a language that is very easy to code and maintain.

I am no JavaScript pro, and I know it. Yet, in a few lines I was able to create what I could only used to dream of. The ease of use and learning only quickens production time, leaving more space for exploration and fun.

The key in making jQuery such a blessing, is that it is truly browser independent. There were some situations when maneuvering around CSS browser quirks would take too much time, so I turned to jQuery’s CSS for help. With another line of code, it got the job done perfectly, and placed a grand smile on my face.

This was the first time I had experienced joy while writing JavaScript. Might be biased for me to say since I have yet to try other JavaScript frameworks, but jQuery, you’re the best.

Roughly about 6 months ago, my then colleague Arul blogged about Gaia (pronounced “guy-uh”), and that marked the changes in me ever since.

Authored by Steven Sacks, “Gaia is a front-end Flash Framework designed to dramatically reduce development time”. What I love about it is that it provides common solutions to repeated tasks that we, as front-end developers, have to face in almost every project, such as:

• Navigation
• Transitions
• Preloading
• Asset management
• Site structure
• Deep linking

From my own experiences of using it in a recent project, Gaia has indeed proven itself in the following areas:

1. The Scaffolding engine creates a click through version of my site in less than 10 minutes! I was able to have a basic run through thereafter with my designer and setting things right the first time saves us a huge amount of time changing later on.
2. I used to hear about swfobject and the goodness of deep linking that swfaddress brings, but I never had an idea of how to implement them. With Gaia, they’re already done for me! No pain, all gain!
3. I am able to do things the way I like, without restricting my coding style by the way Gaia is implemented. This is absolutely a plus, because I don’t have to conform to it, and it still works!

These are just some of the key points actually. The extent of the convenience and time that I saved allowed me to even blog about this right now. To fully understand it’s capabilities, there’s no other better way than to use it in your next project.

You can download the latest framework here, find the documentation here, and if happen to have a few minutes to spare, watch how you can build your very first Gaia project here!

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:

The long awaited AS3 Gaia Framework is nearly upon us! Find out how to participate in the beta release on January 22nd! *w00t*

I’ve always been very keen on learning design patterns (especially being a self taught programmer), and this just seems to be the perfect chance to ease myself into the world of MVC for Flash, Flex, or AIR platforms. I’ve just gotten myself signed up as a beta tester for this courseware, and with credentials that this courseware is excellent, I suggest you get your feet wet with this as well.

In case you have not heard of PureMVC, it “is a lightweight framework for creating applications in ActionScript 3, based upon the classic Model-View-Controller design meta-pattern”.

Read more about it here.

Why not get yourself started as well?