ONIN IT Solutions

Jquery Multiple Effect Slide Show Plugin

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:42:32 +0000

This plugin is designed for rapid development. This is a very quick and easy to implement of slideshow/Rotator dynamically. You can add image or even text content into the rotation with less coding. You can change the effect you want. It supports fading, slideLeft, slideTop effects. You can adjust also the speed of rotation. You don’t need to use CSS, but if you know CSS, much better.

Here’s a very simple implementation of this plugin.
First you have to declare the library and plugin source within tag.

Then initialize the plugin within tag



Where slideShow1 is the id on your  element or Slide Show/Rotator container.

Here’s the extended options for this plugin:

width - The width of your slideshow container default is 100.
height - The height of your slideshow container default is 100.
interval - The speed of the rotation, default is 1000.
transition - The transistion effect of the rotation. Supports (fading, slideLeft, slideTop). Default is fading effect.

The above options can be optional.

Here’s the html for tag

Here’s the complete source code looks like.





Multi Effect Slideshow

Download Plugin

View all sample

HTML Forms: jQuery Basics - Getting Started

admin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:45:27 +0000

By Vincent Wright

So what is jQuery? From the jQuery web site: “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.”

Okay, but what does that mean to me? Put simply, jQuery will help you write JavaScript faster using a simpler syntax. Instead of writing extra lines of code or the writing the same code over and over, you can use jQuery to consolidate the code. jQuery will do the heavy lifting while you can concentrate on the more important stuff.

jQuery also supports the idea of plugins. Plugins allow people to create mini-libraries that complement jQuery. The plugins can be anything from form validation to picture slide shows. We will look at plugins in future articles.

Where to Start

The first thing you will need to do to start using jQuery is to decide if you want to host the jQuery library or use a content delivery network (CDN). If you plan on hosting the jQuery library, you will need to download it from the jQuery web site (http://jquery.com) and upload it to your web server.

The best way to use jQuery is to use a CDN. Both Microsoft and Google offer jQuery on their CDNs. There are several advantages to doing this. The first is that a CDN is spread out over the Internet. When someone comes to your web site and requests the jQuery library, it will be provided to them by the closest hosting site. This will help speed up the download of the library to their local machine. Which brings us to another point, the jQuery library is cached on the user’s machine to help with speed.

The second reason is that if the user has been to another web site that had this CDN reference, the user will already have the jQuery file on their system. This will speed up the loading of your web page since they will not need to download the file again.

When you are looking at the different libraries for jQuery, you will notice there are two. One of them has a “.min” in the file name. This is a “minified” version of the file. It is smaller and will load faster. Why two versions? The non-minified version is easier to read, but since there is a lot of white space, it makes the file larger. It is used to help with debugging.

So whenever possible, always use the CDN and the minified version. This will help speed up your web site.

Next we need to create a reference to the jQuery library. This is done by adding a line in between the opening () and closing () HTML header tags. We will use the Microsoft CDN.

jQuery works like normal JavaScript in the fact that you use

A Quick Example

First, start by creating an HTML document. You can call this anything you want. Enter the code below:

	
		
			
			
		
		
			Click Me

Currently, the link “Click Me” does nothing. Let us change that. Enter the code below in between the script tags.

	$(document).ready(function(){
		$("a").click(function(event){
			alert("You clicked me!");
		});
	});

What we did here was add a click event to the “Click Me” link. When it was clicked, it showed a JavaScript alert.

What is Up with the $

The dollar sign ($) denotes a jQuery constructor. It can be written either as $() or jQuery(). The dollar sign is just a shortcut. All jQuery constructors must start with this.

The constructor starts with a $ and the selector is enclosed in parenthesis. A selector can be an element (tag), an element ID, an element class name. This is similar to the way CSS works. In the example above, we used the anchor tag (a) as a selector. When you use a selector, jQuery searches through the Document Object Model (DOM) to find all selectors that match. In the case of the example above, if we had more than one anchor tag, all anchor tags would now have a click event.

Since selectors work similar to CSS, you will need to specify the selectors in a similar way. When referencing HTML elements, you will just use the element as is. See the following examples:

	$("a") - all anchor tags
	$("p") - all paragraph tags
	$("p.subject") - all paragraph tags with a class of subject

When referencing class names, you must specify the period (.) before the class name as in the following examples:

	$(".subject") - all elements with the class name of subject
	$("p.subject") - all paragraph tags with a class of subject

And last, when referencing IDs, you must specify the # before the ID name:

	$("#subject") - the element with the ID of subject

There are a few other types of selectors and we will talk about those in future articles. For now, these basic selectors should get you started.

Making Sure the Document is Ready

As with JavaScript, you may want to execute your jQuery code after the HTML document has completely loaded and is ready to be manipulated. This is where the $(document).ready function comes in to play. This will keep the JavaScript and jQuery code unloaded until the document is ready. Once the document has loaded, the function will execute. This keeps the code from executing before the document is ready which could cause issues. If you tried to manipulate a DOM element before it was ready, you would lose that functionality.

Conclusion

This article should be able to get you started using jQuery. The great thing about jQuery is that is does not replace JavaScript, just makes it better. Check back later as we will dive deeper into jQuery.

Complete Code Example

	
		
			
			
		
		
			Click Me

Source: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/forms/article.php/3895776

New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET

admin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:18:02 +0000

Earlier this week I blogged about IIS Express, and discussed some of the work we are doing to make ASP.NET development easier from a Web Server perspective.

In today’s blog post I’m going to continue the simplicity theme, and discuss some of the work we are also doing to enable developers to quickly get going with database development. In particular, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just completed the engineering work that enables Microsoft’s free SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE) database to work within ASP.NET applications. This enables a light-weight, easy to use, database option that now works great for ASP.NET web development.

Introducing SQL Server Compact Edition 4

SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. We will be releasing the first public beta of SQL CE Version 4 very shortly. Version 4 has been designed and tested to work within ASP.NET Web applications.

Works with Existing Data APIs

SQL CE works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. Pretty much any existing data API that supports the ADO.NET provider model will work with it.

This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today.

No Database Installation Required

SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can now simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can run and use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. It just works.

Applications you build can redistribute SQL CE as part of them. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work.

Database Files are Stored on Disk

SQL CE stores databases as files on disk (within files with a .sdf file extension). You can store SQL CE database files within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Web application - they do not need to be registered in order to use them within your application.

The SQL CE database engine then runs in-memory within your application. When your application shuts down the database is automatically unloaded.

Shared Web Hosting Scenarios Are Now Supported with SQL CE 4

SQL CE 4 can now run in “medium trust” ASP.NET 4 web hosting scenarios – without a hoster having to install anything. Hosters do not need to install SQL CE or do anything to their servers to enable it.

This means you can build an ASP.NET Web application that contains your code, content, and now also a SQL CE database engine and database files – all contained underneath your application directory. You can now deploy an application like this simply by using FTP to copy it up to an inexpensive shared web hosting account – no extra database deployment step or hoster installation required.

SQL CE will then run within your application at the remote host. Because it runs in-memory and saves its files to disk you do not need to pay extra for a SQL Server database.

Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Support

VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express will add SQL CE 4 tooling support for ASP.NET scenarios in an update we’ll be rolling out in the future. This will enable you to add SQL CE database files to your ASP.NET projects, use the Visual Studio Server Explorer to create and edit tables in them, and use higher-level designers like Entity Framework (see below) to model and map the database to classes that you can then query and program against using LINQ.

This means that in addition to using the same data APIs you know today, you will also be able to easily use the same development tools you already know with SQL CE.

Supports Both Development and Production

SQL CE can be used for both development scenarios and light-usage production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well.

There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.

Easy Migration to SQL Server

SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development and light-usage scenarios. For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate it to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure. These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities.

We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure. You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure. Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work.

Summary

SQL CE 4 provides an easy, lightweight database option that you’ll now be able to use with ASP.NET applications. It will enable you to get started on projects quickly – without having to install a full database on your local development box. Because it is a compatible subset of the full SQL Server, you write code against it using the same data APIs (ADO.NET, Entity Framework, NHibernate, etc).

You will be able to easily deploy SQL CE based databases to a remote hosting account and use it to run light-usage sites and applications. As your site traffic grows you can then optionally upgrade the database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure – without having to change your code.

We’ll be shipping the first public beta of SQL CE 4 (along with IIS Express and several more cool things I’ll be blogging about shortly) next week.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/30/new-embedded-database-support-with-asp-net.aspx

5 Current Social Media that mean good things for your business

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:31:23 +0000

Drive Brand Awareness, Engagement, and Purchase Intent

There are too many happenings everyday in the social media space for any single business owner to keep up with. Today’s web is fast, and very, very innovative. The production never slows down. New tools and integrations are launched seemingly every other minute.

While I’d encourage you to sift through the headlines and social media app directories on a regular basis, I’ve put together a few currently unfolding storylines with big implications for business owners.

What do you think is the most interesting social media development of which we have yet to see the outcome? Let us know.

1. Why the Google Buzz Firehose Will Benefit You

Google Buzz launched to a lot of hype, but that kind of died down to some extent after a while. The privacy-related issues that it launched with didn’t help. However, Google Buzz has steadily been making more moves to become more relevant to the social media universe. It already has a solid user base, and we’ve likely only seen the service’s infancy.

A couple months ago, Google launched the Buzz API, which was a big step in the right direction. This gave developers tools to build applications around Buzz, or integrate Buzz into their existing applications, hence making Buzz more useful. Just as Twitter became more useful when more apps were built for it, Buzz has similar potential.

That potential has now increased greatly, as Google has launched the firehose for the Buzz API. This means that all public information from Buzz users is accessible by developers for use with their apps, which opens the door for many more opportunities. See how some are already using it here.

From the business owner’s perspective, simply think of Buzz as another group of potential customers, in addition to Facebook and Twitter users, which will probably be integrated into many of the same apps that are already utilizing these other groups. So any promotional benefits you are seeing from said apps should increase with the addition of Buzz data, not to mention the fact that this and other factors will likely lead to the growth of Buzz itself. That brings me to the next point.

Do you think Google Buzz will become more useful to your business? Comment here.

2. Google Me

For weeks, Google has been rumored to be working on a new big social network to rival Facebook. The company of course does not comment on rumors, but has not denied the concept. Details are scarce, but “Google Me” as it’s commonly being referred to, will likely utilize existing Google profile pages, which are tied to Google Buzz. As I discussed in a recent article, Google is making all YouTube users connect their accounts to a Google account, which could mean that all of these Google account holders become part of Google’s massive social network by default.

Without knowing Google’s exact plans, it’s hard to say exactly what benefits will become available that aren’t already there, but you can bet that the implications will be big, and it might make all of Google’s social properties more beneficial to businesses. YouTube is one of the most popular sites in the world. Add that to everyone else with a Google account.

Will Google be able to rival Facebook in social media mind share? Comment here.

3. Virtual Goods Increase Purchase Intent

Virtual goods are becoming more popular within social networks, and businesses are already finding ways to utilize them to not only increase brand awareness and influence positive opinions about their products, but drive purchase intent.

In fact, new study from Appssavvy found that they can do all of these things, while increasing all brand metrics. More about this here.

Freelancer.com launches virtual content marketplace freemarket.com!

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:52:47 +0000

First and foremost we are extremely excited to announce the launch of
Freemarket.com, which we aim to grow into the world’s top marketplace
for virtual goods! Over the past month we’ve been testing the
Freemarket with a few thousands beta users and today we finally go
live with over 5000 items!

This new marketplace will allow any of our 1.7 million users to
upload and sell any and all of your virtual content to anyone in
the world.

Your Freelancer account is automatically linked to Freemarket, so
you’ll automatically earn money into your Freelancer account when
items sell.

***
If you upload an item to the store which gets sold between now and
the 20th August 2010 you will win a special Foundation Merchant
insignia to add to your profile! So start stocking the virtual shelves
with all of your great logo designs, web templates, flash files,
scripts, 3D content, graphics, sound clips and more!
***

If you’d like to add a category, just send us a note at the helpdesk
in the Marketplace category. We’ve already had some great suggestions
about adding articles and database sections that we’ll add shortly!

The state of PHP 5.3 support

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:32:29 +0000

PHP 5.3 introduced namespaces and anonymous functions to the PHP world, which are surely great innovations for this programming language. For PHP 5.3 to be widely used, however, it needs to be supported by the various operating systems installed on development boxes and servers.

Linux distributions

The Linux environment commonly offers open source software in the form of binary packages available via repositories, being them in the form of .deb or .rpm files. The major distributions compile and bundle every new release of their bundled softwares, and upload the resulting binaries to a public repository which makes upgrading all installed software as simple as typing sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

PHP is not an exception, and it was usually present in the official repositories of distributions since its 4.x branch. Having PHP 5.3 packages instead of 5.1 or 5.2 in the official repositories is an implicit guarantee of compatibility, and is preferrable to the addition of external sources which may become out-of-date or raise conflicts. The alternative to using binary packages is compiling PHP from source code, a solution that can be time consuming and difficult for a beginner.

In their latest release, some distributions have jumped on the 5.3 bandwagon and now include binary packages of PHP 5.3. Ubuntu Linux is the leader distribution here with PHP 5.3.2, while Fedora Constantine (and Goddard) and openSUSE 11.2 follow with 5.3.0. Ubuntu probably made the right choice by jumping to 5.3 with the release of Lucid Lynx last April. Lucid is a Long Term Support release, whose updates will be provided until 2013 in Desktop Edition and 2015 in Server Edition.

Other distributions are experiencing a slower adoption – Debian and RedHat has PHP 5.3 available only in their testing branches and not in stable releases. If you are stuck with a distro without official packages for PHP 5.3, you may consider installation from an external reliable repository like Zend Server’s one (available for free in its Community Edition).

Windows

On the Windows platform, the situation is a bit different. Windows machines do not employ repositories for distributing software, but in turn there is only one bloodline of Windows to support and not a multitude of distributions.

In fact, binary packages for PHP 5.3 are available on the official windows.php.net website, and independent vendors like WampServer and EasyPHP, which provide the full software stack from Apache to PHP and MySQL, have already upgraded to PHP 5.3.0 in stable releases.
Mac

Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard comes with PHP 5.3 bundled, but there are also other options to install a customized version of PHP 5.3, for example to cherry-pick core extensions or to run it on a previous version of Mac OS X.

The simplest solution is to use MacPorts, which simplifies very much the process of compiling and installing open source software on the Mac platform. Currently the MacPorts version of PHP is 5.3.2 and provides separate packages for extensions. Its usage from the command line is similar to Linux’s repositories model. Another option is instead to run a full stack platform like in Linux and Windows cases: MAMP is probably the most popular choice, and it provides both PHP 5.3 and 5.2.

Desktop vs. Server

Desktop machines are much more susceptible to change than their server equivalent, especially than the shared hosting services which made the fortune of PHP all over the world. Despite this, Linux distributions and open source PHP frameworks push for upgrading to PHP 5.3 as soon as possible, while system administrators must maintain a stable environment in their production machines and need to balance the performance and feature improvements with the compatibility breaks.

PHP 4 is sometimes still spotted on production servers now, after six years from the release of PHP 5.0.0 and almost two after its end of life — given that painful experience hopefully PHP 5.3 will be embraced more quickly.

PHP: the teenage years

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:25:14 +0000

FROM: Marco Tabini

For some value of the word “turned,” PHP just turned fifteen. Wow.

I still vaguely remember when I turned fifteen—“rebellious,” “obnoxious” and “bad haircut” are all words that come to mind. But those were also very exciting years, full of hopes, possibilities and the knowledge that, in merely a few years’ time, I would have been able to make the roads a little less safe (in Italy, you have to be eighteen to drive, thankfully).

Milestones are not as important in our industry as they are in our lives—the way I see it, if you work in the computer field and turn to look at back at what has been, someone will have passed you by—but there are some very important lessons that can be learned from the story of PHP.

As a development project, PHP has always been a little rudderless. As a programming language, it is, on the surface, an amorphous and mismatched mass of all sorts of programming paradigms and functions that are sometimes incompatible and in conflict with one another. We have one of the best array libraries in existence—but only because the language constructs that we call arrays are not, technically speaking, arrays at all. It took two major releases to have proper object orientation. And so on, and so forth.

Purists hate PHP because, they claim, it promotes bad programming practices and is, for lack of a more accurate term, a mess. But those of us who have grown to appreciate its strengths know that PHP is like the workbench in your garage: a little messy, but filled with all the tools you may ever need to do any job imaginable. You can’t blame the workbench if you decide to drive a screw into the wall with a hammer.

As it turns fifteen, PHP and its community are like every other teenagers: sometimes lazy, sometimes brilliant, often rebellious and unfocused. The language itself has finally matured to the point where finding new functionality to add is becoming challenging and the real development work has, at least for the moment, shifted to projects that are based on PHP rather than being PHP itself. Frameworks of all complexities and sizes are thriving and occupying an ever-more-important role in our day-to-day development—although those who choose to go “naked” still have all the tools to build their applications without using anything more than what the base language provides.

Going forward, there are some real challenges. The first is going to be preventing the language from stagnating—PHP 6 is languishing to the point where so many people have worked around the issues it solves that it’s going to be difficult to continue working on it in its current state.

The other great challenge is finding a way to deal with the fragmentation that has cemented in the world of PHP frameworks. There is no clear winner in this space—even when you consider “application frameworks” like Drupal and Wordpress, there are so many contenders, each with their own large community, that “supporting PHP development” is rapidly becoming a difficult proposition to make. When vendors and users decide to provide solutions for only a subset of the community, we all lose something—even those who gain the immediate benefit, because eventually they will suffer from a weakened and fragmented platform.

Happy fifteen PHP—and many returns