classical geek

My one day at QCon on Friday was interesting, plenty of good ideas and discussion. I kept to time in my own talk, and had some good questions. The highlights for me, though, were in hearing what everyone else had to say.
Bruce Johnson gave a good overview of Google Web Toolkit, something I’ve been following […]

I’ll be in London on Friday at QCon, talking about whether we need to think of the Javascript code in the browser as a separate tier in our n-tier applications. The short answer is ‘yes’, for those not able to attend, but along the way I’ll be visiting some common design patterns, and looking at […]

It was Microsoft’s classic ASP that first made the breakthrough, I think, of turning the CGI program inside out, so that snippets of code were embedded in the HTML, rather than the other way round. Nowadays, it seems so obvious, and every web programming system under the sun does it - PHP, ASP, JSP, Erb, […]

I’ve long been told that the with keyword in JavaScript is bad news, and long believed it. Today, I had a reminder of why that was.
I’m looking at a HTML form, that I want to parse programmatically rather than doing a straight submit. The parsing code that i’m modifying looks roughly like this:

var status=null;
with (document.myForm){
[…]