I just did a sharing about ASP.NET MVC and jQuery tips and tricks about 2 weeks ago at Tech Insights 2010 event http://www.techinsights.my/ . I am little bit disappointed with my performance over there. In fact, I felt dizzy and nervous during the sharing when looking down to all the audience down from the stage. Oh my god, seems I am still not well trained with this kind of event. Anyway, I have some plans in my mind to train myself be better and cope well with this kind of event.
I created a simple shopping cart for the sharing and it is called eStore. If you are familiar with shopping cart then you will know some of the features is mandatory to be included such as product details, product browsing, product searching and so on. I don't manage to include Administration functions and shipping module.. Anyway, like what I said the intention to create this shopping cart is to show how jQuery can be integrated with ASP.NET MVC and enhance the User Experience (UX) and so on. I hosted the project to Codeplex.com. The URL for the project is http://estore.codeplex.com. I included the project template to start off the jQuery integration process as well so you don't need to build it from scratch. Some of the jQuery plugin are used in the eStore such as jQuery UI, jQuery Watermark, jQuery Lightbox, jQuery Coda Slider and so on. I planned to use jQPlot for the charting in the administration page and it is in my todo list. Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any suggestion or question.
I was invited by Patrick to speak in Tech Insights 2010. My topic is "ASP.NET MVC with jQuery - tips and tricks". I can say the topic take focus on Web Developer and developers or for those like to know more about ASP.NET. However, if you concerns about the design of application, MVC is one of the pattern that suitable for it.
MVC is acronym for Model View Controller. It is a kind of art of programming that stated how should your application be separated in term of layers. It also allow the developer to test each of component individually since it also promotes separation of concerns. It also allow me to implement TDD or Test Driven Development in the projects and it allow all the component to be tested before any other functional or system test.
Model can be related to Data Model and Domain Model. Data Model is the layer that capsuled the logic how the application should access database.View is the presentation layer and it present how should the information formed and visible to the user. For example, if the user have 1000 or more of student records, I can present it as a table, a repeated list, and even you can put some filter such as age filter, performance filter to allow the teacher to do some filtering on the information and let them find what they want instantly. The View also define how the user interact with the system or application. The design of View is important as it can leads to how is the productivity of a user. For example, the application is efficient if a click can trigger an action compare to another application that needs 3 clicks to trigger the action. The Controller receives input and initiates a response by making calls on model objects. A controller will get the input based on the user and instructs the model and viewport to perform actions based on that input
ASP.NET MVC is a framework that adopts MVC framework and it is still built on top of ASP.NET. The ASP.NET MVC 2.0 is better than 1.0 as it have more features. ASP.NET MVC is flexible enough to allow developers build their own View Engine and also Controller Factory. You are allow to use MEF, Unity and other IoC framework or Service Locator framework to build them. Some of the existing View Engine that you can download or use such as Spark, NDJango and so on.
I bet you use jQuery before. If not you may goto http://jquery.com/ to grab a copy to use it in your web application. I will say the learning curve of this framework is minimum compare to others. What is jQuery? jQuery is created by John Resig. It is a Javascript framework to speed up your development and eliminate your lines of code. Microsoft already integrated jQuery framework into Visual Studio since few years back. I will say it really help all web developers eliminates big collection lines of code. I was a web developer and I know the pain to write script and dealing with the DOM. jQuery really helps me a lot in my web development since few years back in some of the projects.
For example, the single line of code that shown below find the paragraph elements that with neat class name and add the new "ohmy" class name into it and at last it show this invisible element slowly. I can still remembered I wrote more than 5 lines to do the same task! So now can you imagine the power of jQuery?
$("p.neat").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");
jQuery is more than that. The creator of jQuery is smart and allow jQuery to be extended by everyone. He allows everyone to unleash their creativity. So please stay tune to see how I use the jQuery to build a more friendly eStore. I hope everyone will like it. Please left me some comments if you want to know more!
I am execited about Google Android based phone lately. I am learning and finding some resources about Android and also development. For the moment right now, there are some Android phone in the market, such as Motorola DROID, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Sony Ericssion X10 and so on. For more information about Android powered phone, please take a look at http://www.androphones.com/. If you are still wondering what is Android, you may find some details about Android Mobile OS from Wikipedia. For developers in Android, I found some simple tutorials that helps me to understand Android development. There are listed as below, you may need Eclipse or Netbeans IDE to develop it:
And for sure, we won't miss out the tutorials and dev guides from Android Official site: http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html and also forum http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers.
Some Android development related videos:
In case you are in living Malaysia especally Kuala Lumpur area, you may attend their meet up all the times. Please get more details from the Facebook group http://www.facebook.com/#/group.php?gid=133530318700&ref=ts. Last but not least, try to join this forum too, I found out it have quite number of resources http://www.anddev.org/viewforum.php?f=8. And for the Android mobile phone beginners, you may try to take a look at the list of Android Starter Apps shared by CNET,
Editted 31-DEC-09
Added some blogrolls that write Android related posts, please enjoy :
http://saigeethamn.blogspot.com/
http://www.helloandroid.com/tutorials
