Phil Parsons

Offline files with HTML 5

Phil — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:15:43 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with the FileSystem API in Chrome over the last couple of weeks and thought I’d share my musings with a little demo of a file syncing system that I am thinking of using in an application where the user can download a copy of the file, work on it offline and then sync it when connected again. In this post I just want to show the pull side of the sync where the file is downloaded and …

XMLHttpRequest Level 2 Ajax library, xhr2-lib

Phil — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:12:02 +0000

So a while ago a messed about with the File API and FormData with the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 spec which enables the transfer of binary data and tracking of the upload progress through the XMLHttpRequestUpload object – awesome. I was blown away when I first started messing about with this stuff and support for it now seems to be a little more wide spread, nothing in IE or Opera as of yet but you know life goes on. What I …

jQuery Ajax navigation plugin – jNavigate

Phil — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:37:51 +0000

jNavigate is a powerful jQuery plugin that enables you to build single page sites using dynamic content areas powered by Ajax technologies simply and quickly. Turn your website’s hyperlinks into triggers that load page content dynamically reducing the load on your web server while enhancing your users browsing experience. Visit the official siteSource code on Github I posted jNavigate as a jQuery plugin a while back and it received a small amount of attention but soon became evident that I …

Increment operator issue with ColdFusion 8 arrays

Phil — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:01:28 +0000

I spent a good 30 mins debugging a module in one of our products that has been running fine in CF8 for a while but crashed when run on CF9 recently. The problem turned out to be a bug in my code but it also unveiled this freaky bug with CF8. It turns out that if you try to increment the value of a variable used as an array index when assigning a structure or array to that index using …

PONG Turbo – My first stab at game programming

Phil — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:53:05 +0000

First there was Space Invaders... then there was Pacman... then there was PONG... Now I bring to you, PONG Turbo

jRegex – A visual Regular Expressions Tool

Phil — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:10:37 +0000

To celebrate (inter)national Regular Expressions day 2011 I have decided to polish up and share one of my dev tools with the rest of the world. jRegex is born.

Getting capture groups from regex matches in ColdFusion

Phil — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:17:23 +0000

Well, actually, you can’t. If you want to reference capture groups from a match you need to use the regex package from Java. From what I know ColdFusion uses the now redundant Regex engine from Jakarta which also doesn’t support back references. I, myself, have completely given up on the built in support for regular expressions for anything that isn’t incredibly basic and now reach for Java every time. Pattern Matcher The code snippet below runs a fairly simple match …

jNavigate jQuery Plugin

Phil — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:36:19 +0000

This plugin has had a rewrite and can now be found at the official jNavigate website I started building this plugin a while back when I wanted to replicate some of the nicer features of ColdFusion’s CFajax library such as the connection between a CFForm and it’s parent CFDiv where the CFForm submits and loads back into the CFDiv via ajax. If any of you are familiar with the ColdFusion implemetation of this then you are also probably aware of …

Caching API responses with PHP

Phil — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 16:30:43 +0000

Most websites have some kind of widget that fetches data from an external RESTful API provided by services such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to name just a few. These APIs often limit the amount of hits any one Domain/IP can make and if you go over your rate limit then pow, no data for you and an empty widget. This PHP class gives you a mechanism to cache your API responses locally and only update them on a set …

Job opportunities

Phil — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:27:18 +0000

The company I work for (VerseOne Technologies) based in Woking, Surrey (just south of London and commutable from the A3/M25) is looking for a couple of new front end developers. The full job specification can be found on the company website, the job description and main candidate requirements are shown below. Job description VerseOneʼs vision is to provide intuitive solutions that empower all organisations to manage and make available all relevant content to customers, partners and employees in an accessible …