As I have mentioned in my previous post these days I’m involve in developing a web based CRM for a client in UK in the company I’m employed. I’m currently in the phase two of its development. In this effort I had to incorporate various functionalities into it, such as calendar for event management, bulk file uploading, star rating for order and product profitability, various UI enhancements, etc…
In fulfilling these requirements within the strict project deadline I consult the help of Google Search to find answers to them. With few hours of searching I came across some fabulous tools that helped me to achieve my requirements with few or no effort. So I though of sharing the benefit with you. I must especially thank all the authors of such tools for releasing them to be use in any project for zero cost and fair licenses (LGPL, Apache, MIT, Mozilla etc… )
File Uploading
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FancyUpload
FancyUpload is a file-input replacement which features an unobtrusive, multiple-file selection menu and queued upload with an animated progress bar. It is easy to setup, is server independent, completely styleable via CSS and XHTML and uses mootools to work in all modern browsers.
Event Calendar
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Maian Events
Maian Events is a nice XHTML/CSS theme based calendar with options to auto archive events after they have finished. Visitors can also post comments for events if enabled and pictures can also be added by admin if applicable.
UI Enhancement
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RokBox
RokBox, the successor of our popular RokZoom plugin, is a mootools powered JavaScript slideshow that allows you to quickly and easily display multiple media formats including images, videos (video sharing services also) and music. RokBox provides a theme system that allows you to create your own custom ones to fit your websites design.
ReMooz
ReMooz is an open-source widget for great looking and unobtrusive inline-pop-ups, powered by mootools. It enables how your visitors browse through content, such as thumbnail images and HTML. ReMooz features centered or relative-positioned draggable zoomed images, content preloading, fading captions, with plenty of options and is highly configurable: Add a simple image zoom or create a fancy design element for any graphic that needs to be enlarged on your site..
One mission Accomplished, what next?
November 28, 2009 at 5:44 am (Life, SAHANA)
The past four and half years was the most enjoyable and the productive years of my life. In this time I had all the freedom to explore into many areas of the society as a university student. This period left me many memorable things and also gave me the chance to decide what I’ll do in the future. Most of the occasions people welcome us so warmly and corporate well in most activities where normal citizen would had to put an extra effort do the same activity. In a way I’m so lucky that I was so fortunate to continue my higher education in the field I’m interested in and earn a degree from a state owned university. During this endeavor I got opportunities to share what I have learn for the benefit of the society both local(SLAF) and international(Sahana) activities.
Now the time has come for me to think and work in a more responsible manner because most of what I’ll do will have a bigger impact to my future. As a start I have to find a sufficient income to support my own expenses rather continue to put that burden on my parents. I was successful in getting over that, within a month time, completing the degree I found an exciting and challenging place to work. Its has been almost two months has passed since I join the company. It was very challenging where I got the opportunity to work directly with a client and carried out development of a software system. My target was to built a web based system that helps the parties (customers, salesmen, owner, manufacturers, suppliers, etc.. ) to carry out their tasks in a user friendly and with minimum effort. It was a very challenging task for me because I had to learn many things. Luckily for me the client (Stuart) I was contacting has worked as a software developer, so this helped me a lot in all means of activities. My deadline for the completing of the projects is only two weeks ahead. Looking at the progress so far I have achieved I believe that target is achievable.
During the latter part of October I did a presentation at a local conference for a research carried out for the Sahana project. The presentation was grate success. Fifteen papers were presented at the conference covering various fields such as Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Telecommunication Engineering. Sahana is a project that focuses on building a versatile tool for post disaster/emergency management activities in the world with the collaborative effort of dedicated volunteers from all around the world.
Yahoo YUI Theater
October 27, 2009 at 12:52 pm (CSS, Javascript, Web)
Recently while I was searching the web to find resources on web development I came across the Yahoo’s YUI Theater that provides valuable insight into the world of Web development through a series of videos that covers basically most of things required to know by a person who is into web development. I strongly believe that anyone who likes to understand the basics should watch it.
Out of the dozens of videos I loved the following ones
- Nate Koechley — Professional Frontend Engineering
- Nate Koechley — The YUI CSS Foundation
- Douglas Crockford — The JavaScript Programming Language
- Douglas Crockford — An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM
- John Resig — The DOM Is a Mess
Sahana GSoC 2009 WrapUp
September 16, 2009 at 4:36 pm (FOSS, SAHANA)
Almost most of the excitement related to this year’s GSoC has come to the end with lot of success. This time I got the chance to be part of this wonderful community representing Sahana Project as a mentor. Looking into the history of GSoC Sahana Project has won a grate position, I’m telling this because Sahana Project got selected as a mentoring organization for the fourth consecutive year (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). As previous this time also Sahana Project won ten positions. These ten positions got allocated to students proposals from Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan (out of 44 proposals), out of them eight students were successfully in building new features to the project.
I mentored Akshit Sharma form India who developed the Dynamic Theme Manager module that enables the user to alter the existing theme to his/her preference without needing to have any knowledge about CSS, just through the use of a color pallet to select the respective colors and a new logo.
Although with my academic work I didn’t had much trouble finding time to guide him to understanding the system’s functionality throughout the summer since he is just a time zone away. It was a grate experience for me. To my understanding he enjoyed working with Sahana community and hope to have his contributions in the future as well. Lastly I would like to congratulate all the eight students for being successful in delivering new modules to leverage the functionality of Sahana.
I just got a email notification from FedEx stating that Google has handed over a T-Shirt to them to deliver it to me.
Thank you Google.Looking at the history of GSoC the University of Moratuwa has reached a significant milestone by being the top ranking university that produced the highest number of student participants in the GSoC 2009, 2008 and alltime
Sun’s JavaFx session at FIT
August 25, 2009 at 5:54 pm (FOSS, University)
Today I got an opportunity to take part in a Sun’s JavaFX training session at our Faculty. This session was conducted by Mr. Feisal Ahmad from Singapore. He was currently a Senior Technology Consultant in Sun Learning Services at Sun Microsystems. Along with him some senior officials from Sun Microsystems visited our Faculty, this training session was part of their programme.
There was a session introducing the Sun Microsystems’s new technology that enables all the Java developers (web component, standalone application and mobile application) to use a common technology for creating rich applications using a common user interface called JavaFX . For me it felt like they have combined the features of Java Swing, MIDP, JSP, JSF, etc for creating rich GUIs and JavaScript or VRML kind of syntax for implementing the properties and controls for these components sticking to Java’s basic syntax.
During the morning session Feisal talk to us about the features and capabilities of JavaFX and how it can be used to make the life easy for developers in creating eye catching GUI applications which can be easily ported to run on any platform(Web, Mobile or Standalone). This further strengthen their saying ‘write once and run anywhere‘ making it applicable for all the hardware platforms. It was a technology that gives the flexibility to the programmer to create the GUI with very small set of lines of codes when comparing to earlier technologies that took hundred lines of code. It provide plugins support for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for creating the necessary designs and for developers this technology is freely available for download as a plugin for NetBeans. For beginners they have provided a nice set of tutorials and other resources covering its basics and for getting our hands dirty. Next he extended his discussion toward Java’s enterprise technologies and the important aspects (about the importance of the Functional requirements as well as the Non-functional requirements) that we should considered when building enterprise level world applications. He explained about these aspects and how it can be handled using J2EE platform.
The afternoon session was dedicated give us a hands on experience about the JavaFX technology. During this session I learned how to make use of JavaFX to build a small image sideshow incorporating rich features like tweening, scaling, rotating, adding reflections, etc… into it and later we looked at how to incorporate a media player into a Java application having features that we are currently experiencing with web based Flash video players. At the end of the session Feisal asked questions based on the stuff he spoke to us during the morning session and gave gifts for those who gave correct answers and I was fortunate to win a laptop bag and a T-shirt having the Sun logo embedded.
I would like to give my special thanks to Mr. Feisal Ahmad of Sun Microsystems for his wonderful effort and spending his entire day with us sharing his knowledge and experiences, also I would like to thank my friend Ransara for coordinating this event in collaboration with NetAssists International.
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