Sagar Ganatra's Blog

Today I was trying to understand the FlexBox layout introduced in CSS and was impressed with what a few CSS properties can do to help you solve layout issues. The standard itself has gone through some iterations, but I believe the current one is stabilised and is not likely change completely. Anyway, the layout proposed here helps you align the elements in the DOM tree horizontally and vertically. It also helps you reorder these elements.

I was having a conversation with my college friend about the enhancements in XHR2 and I was showing him how one can  upload a file to the server using plain Ajax . He asked me whether I can upload a large file to the server such as a video file. I tried doing that but was bumped when the server reported with 400 error telling me that the 'POST size has exceeded maximum limit'. This got me thinking whether I can upload chunks of a large file to the server. I referred to the FileSystem API and came across the slice method that allows you to get a fragment of a file.

Yesterday I explored the MVVM design pattern in Kendo UI that allows the model data to be separated from the view. Also, whenever data in one of them changes it is reflected in the other. Today I was exploring various data bindings that can be used and one that caught my attention was the source binding. The source binding allows you to set the HTML content of the target element by rendering a Kendo template with a View-Model value. For example, say you have a combo box (select tag) and you want to populate it with data (option tags), then instead of writing several option tags you can define a template and provide source binding for the same. This will show a list of options from the ViewModel.

Kendo UI is completely new to me and I got introduced to it when Brandon Satrom left Microsoft and joined the Kendo UI team. I had interacted with him when I was working on jQuery ‘Pinify’ plugin . Kendo UI is a HTML5, jQuery based framework for building both web and mobile applications. It not only provides a set of UI widgets and other data visualization components but also a framework for data binding, animation and drag-and-drop. Whilst I was looking into the framework I stumbled upon the Mode-View ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern built into it.

I finally completed reading ‘Steve Jobs Way’ by Jay Elliot. I wanted to know how Apple became so innovative and so successful and I knew that Steve did an awesome job to bring this company to a state which is very well known today. Before I started reading this book I had a notion that this book would focus on how hard work or dedication would pay off and all that stuff that one would generally see in any book. This book was different. Different in a way that it taught me the qualities a leader in any industry should have.

My Adobe Developer Connect article on 'Getting Started with RESTful Web Services in ColdFusion 10' is now live. Learn how you can get started with creating, publishing and consuming RESTful Web Services in ColdFusion. -  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/restful-web-services.html

I like the media queries feature added to CSS 3, that allows web application developers or designers to define styling sheets for a range of output devices. A media query consists of a media type and one or more expressions that limits the style sheet scope. I was wondering if JavaScript can be used to update the elements in page, say changing the source attribute of an image based on the device width. Turns out there is a function matchMedia which accepts a media query string as input and returns the result.