Flex Lecture and Yahoo! Wikisearch

Here's what we've covered over the last 3 weeks.

Flex Lecture PPT

Yahoo! Wiki-search Widget


The flex code we did in class:

Google Employees Example (UI Components and XML data)
Dealing with external service
Mashup Paul and I made...code isn't so clean

To get started in Flex, I would reccomend using Flex Builder. You can get all the info here: Download Flex SDK, Builder, etc.... There's also some good tutorials here: Getting started with Flex

One cool website we showed you guys was ProgrammableWeb which lists API's and cool mashups that others have done.

If you want to know some good JavScript or Flex online resources and/or books, let me know, and I'll post some stuff I use.

Javascript Libraries Part 2

Sorry I didn't post this earlier but here it is. This is the second half of the lecture on Javascript libraries.

Lecture PPT


The libraries we covered today were:

Dojo
Open Laszlo
Google Web Toolkit

The second two have extensive examples so I only did an example for Dojo:

Dojo Fisheye

Lecture 6,7,8: JavaScript

Been a while since we posted. This lecture covers a lot, from basic JavaScript to DOM to dHTML to Advanced JavaScript with prototype-inheritance and function closures and finally to AJAX.

Lecture PPT

We also went over some examples. I've posted those here:

Table Row Highlighter
Move Element
Drag'n Drop

Lecture 4/5: Ruby on Rails

Here's lecture 4/5 on Ruby on Rails

Lecture 4/5 (PPT | Code)

Sorry if the code example was a little boring, but important points to take away are that Ruby is a really cool language, and Rails is a great framework that makes a lot of the typical stuff (form abstract, no SQL, database relationships, etc...) much simpler.

Websites mentioned were:

• Web 2.0 Video
• Video for installing Ruby on Rails
• Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
• Great Free Book on Ruby

As we start covering JavaScript and DHTML, I recommend you guys fool around creating a basic website and manipulating some CSS styles.

Lecture 3

This is Lecture 3, which is the lecture on CSS. It basically lists a bunch of different property values, but if you weren't in class then you probably didn't hear me go over the important ones. There will be some resources posted that has a link to a CSS reference page, that you can go to if you want to know what a specific property does.

Lecture 3 (PPT)

We also played some Jeopardy and here is the powerpoint for that as well.

Jeopardy (PPT)

Lecture 2

Here's lecture 2. Topics covered were HTML (yes, a little boring) and HTTP Requests.

Lecture 2 (PPT)

Siva did a really neat demo of how you can just telnet into a webserver and request documents. Just try something, like:

telnet www.google.com 80
GET / HTTP1.1
Host: www.google.com

Siva also mentioned a cool firefox extension called firebug (you can get it here: Firebug). The newest version, 1.0, just came out on 1/24/07. To monitor traffic, open up firebug (tools->firebug->open firebug). Then select the net subheader. Now you can monitor traffic on the site you are looking at.

Siva also began a demo for the Carnegie Mellon Delivery Service (CMDS), and the current progress for that page is here: CMDS. We will be using this throughout the course and updates will be posted accordingly. To look at the code, right click in the browser and do view source.

Good websites for help and further info:

• Understand Application Layer Protocols: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Quick reference to HTTP headers
• HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 Reference
• Info about Doctypes

Lecture 1

Here's lecture 1. It helps define what the course is and what topics we will go over. It also attempts to define the very ambiguous term, Web 2.0.

Lecture 1 (PPT)