West, Donavon West

While in a recent job interview I was asked to highlight a project that I am most proud. The interviewer wanted me to point out some interesting or technically challenging aspect of the project that might not be obvious. What a great question and topic for an article, I thought, but what should I write about?

I have written many complex web applications, gadgets and widgets that I am very proud of, but sticking with the job search theme, I decided to discuss my resume/portfolio web application as it represents what I do best. I'm very happy with the overall look and feel, but I feel that it's even more impressive under the covers.

This "making of" article will highlight some things about my resume/portfolio web application that I believe make it stand out from your typical website.

I invite you to look at the source code. You will find that it may be over engineered for a simple menu driven site, but remember that the site itself is intended to showcase my work. Obviously you can do a view/source to see the HTML, but please also download the JavaScript and CSS source files. Take most note of the file framework.js which is at the heart of the entire system.

A Web Application and not a Web Page

First of all, my resume/portfolio site is really an object oriented JavaScript web application and not just a web page. Everything about the site is generated through JavaScript classes. I have built up a small framework for handling the various tasks that need to be performed.

For example, instead of manually creating the markup for a button in HTML, I make a call to a the framework helper function createButtonBase with the parent element, the CSS class, title and a pointer to an onclick "handler".

homeButton = DonavonWest.UI.createBaseButton(clientAreaEl, "home-button", "Portfolio Home Screen", homeButtonHandler);

In the example above, homeButton references the button class, not an HTML element. Member functions can be called to performs tasks like showing and hiding the button. For example:

homeButton.hide();

I've implemented hide() and show(), but a fully functional button class would likely also have the following member functions:

• click() – to simulate a mouse click
• disable() – to place the button in a disabled state
• enable() – to place the button in an enabled state

When the application is closing, a call to the button member function dispose() will tear down the class and release any resources that it has created.

homeButton.dispose();

JavaScript Namespaces

I make extensive use of JavaScript namespaces in all of the objects, functions and classes. To avoid having to use "if (!window.x)" over and over, I've written a namespace helper function which is show here:

//create our base object (don't tread on any other browser objects)
if (!window.DonavonWest){
    window.DonavonWest = {};
}
if (!window.DonavonWest.Utils){
    window.DonavonWest.Utils = {};
}

//namespace helper
DonavonWest.Utils.ns = function (ns) {
    var base=window;
    var nss=ns.split(".");
    for (var i=0; i < nss.length; i++){
        if (!base[nss[i]]){
            base[nss[i]]={};
        }
        base=base[nss[i]];
    }
};

DonavonWest.Utils.ns("DonavonWest.UI");

It's pretty simple. First I manually create the namespace DonavonWest.Utils. Then I define my ns function. From then on creating a namespace is as simple as calling ns with a string representation of the namespace to create.

CSS Namespaces

It is just as important to use namespaces in your CSS as it is in your JavaScript. It's up to you if you want to use descendent selectors and/or child selectors, but it is important that at a minimum all of your CSS created as a descendent selector underneath of your base CSS namespace. Note that the base CSS namespace will vary with the class in question (i.e. DonavonWest_WebApp vs. DonavonWest_Resume) but it should always include your root namespace in the name (i.e. DonavonWest).

CSS Sprites

Where applicable, the application incorporates CSS Sprites. Think of CSS Sprites like a film strip that you slide up and down (or even left to right or both) to reveal a single frame through a hole. The other frames are still there, they are just hidden from view.

To the right is the image that I use for the that I use for the "home" button on the portfolio and below is my CSS. Notice that even though the button has two states (i.e. normal and hover), only one image is defined in CSS. When the hover state is shown, the image is simply repositioned along the Y axis (slid down in this case) so that a different image is rendered.

.DonavonWest_Portfolio>.client_area>.home-button {
    position:absolute;
    left:0px;
    top:70px;
    width:30px;
    height:27px;
    overflow:hidden;
    background-image:url(images/home-buttons.png);
    background-position:0 -27px;
    cursor:pointer;
}
.DonavonWest_Portfolio>.client_area>.home-button:hover {
    background-position:0 0px;
}

In other implementations where there is also a disabled state, the image would simply grow in height.

The Facebook Thumbnail Trick

This last thing I want to talk about isn't technologically advanced or even that cool in the grand scheme of things, but in the viral/social driven world that we live in on the web, presentation matters. You've probably done this before. You want to tell your Facebook friends about this cool website that you found, so you click on "Add a link".

You type in the URL of the website and click Attach. Facebook retrieves the site information, but you have to sort through many unrelated images to get to one that you want to display. In some cases, there are no images at all. Here is what it looks like when you enter Microsoft's new search engine http://bing.com, also a web application.

Not very visually appealing is it? Sorry to pick on you Bing, but I gave this tip to one of the PMs on the Bing team several weeks ago and nothing. :)

Now look at what happens when you go to my resume site at http://donavon.com/resume:

How did I do it? First create a 100x75 pixel thumbnail image. It can be anything you like, but I chose a screen shot of the finished website. Now place an <img> tag near the top of your HTML, preferably right after the <body> tag. Make sure you hide it somehow using CSS. Like this:

<body>
    <img style="display:none" src="images/webthumb100.png" alt="" />

The description used by Facebook also comes from the HTML. Place the description in a meta tag and place it in the <head> block as shown here:

<head>
    <title>Donavon West Portfolio/Resume</title>
    <meta name="description" content="This is the Portfolio/Resume website of Donavon West: devigner (part developer/part designer) and an expert at designing and building gadgets and widgets." />

One more, one more thing…

Shortly after publishing this article on my blog at blog.donavon.com, I decided that it needed to somehow be incorporated into the resume app itself. I didn't want just a static link so how could my app consume the blog post that was published on Blogger?

The good news is that blogger can publish posts in JSON format. The bad news is that Ajax can't cross domains (yes, I know about "alt=json-in-script" but what a hack). At first I thought I would simply grab a copy of the JSON feed and drop in onto my site as a static file, so I wrote the code to read and display a blog post (a simple matter of 5-10 minutes using my framework) and I was in business.

But what if the blog post changed because of a discovered typo maybe or I may even have more to say? I'm too lazy to be constantly updating my static JSON file but as a wise person once said "laziness [and porn] are the mothers of invention" (oh, that wise person happens to be Alyssa, my wife ;).

My solution? A few years back, I had written a configurable and secure HTTP proxy DLL as an HttpHandler in C#.NET. It's called RssProxy because at the time, that's all I needed to proxy. All I had to do now was create a bin directory, drop in the DLL and configure the web.config file (below). 

Viola! You can now read about the making of my resume application using my resume application. I know it's not all "chicken or the egg" or "grandfather paradox" but it still kind of has that feel. :)

<rssProxy>
    <rss name="blog.rpx" url="http://blog.donavon.com/feeds/posts/default/1484428372750514936?alt=json" />
</rssProxy>

Conclusion

To those of you reading this because you are considering hiring me, thank you. Resumes are a great source of information, but I hope that reading this article has give you a better understanding of what I am capable of and my resourcefulness. If your planning to build a modern cross platform object oriented JavaScript web application, I think that you will find that I will be an invaluable resource.