Web-based WYSIWYG Form designer

A few days ago I decided to suppress my “conservative” stance towards massive Javascript usage and started working on a WYSIWYG editor for HTML Forms, The application resembles drag-and-drop GUI editors, I’ve spent lot of time in building the codebase to make it as Object oriented as possible.

The codebase is simply composed of two parts, Core and pluginis “Elements”

Each draggable element is handled by a 2 files

• A javascript file that does the rendering and the event handling “Events are triggered by the core and passed down to each individual element”.
• A php file that defines what properties the element has, these information are used by the core to generate property page, this file is just meant to hold configuration parameters, no actual coding involved.

Adding a new element would just require writing two files and the core handles the rest.

I’m using Prototype, script.aculo.us and Webtoolkit context menu, No true AJAX has been used so far, everything is done on the client side.

Now the question is , what does the end user see?

• Drag and drop environment
• Context menu for each element
• Properties for each element
• Simple keyboard interaction “Selected element can be deleted by pressing the (del) button (except textfield and textarea)”

I’ve tested this on FF2 and IE6.

What I really need to implement right now is the “Resize” function

Why don’t you check A demo of the code in action

I plan to turn this into a Joomla! forms component soon Insh’Allah.

Update: My Proposal to Google Summer of Code has been accepted and I’ll be working on implementing this form editor as a Joomla! 1.5 component, You can find more information about my progress on my GSoC blog

CSS Naked day!

No , My blog is not broken , CSS has been deliberately turned off to celebrate the 3rd CSS Naked day.

You know what, I kinda like my blog the way it is now, without any CSS :).

It is finally here , Joomla! 1.5

The long waited Joomla! 1.5 has finally hit stable status

Born in the age of GUI

I thought I was born in the age of CLI “DOS and it’s likes” but this movie proved me wrong, The movie is a bit long, it’s talking about Apple Lisa.

I never used Windows 3.1 until I was like 10 that was my first GUI
-based operating system, before that I was on DOS 5.0 then 6.22.

Wiki for group translation

Being active (just a bit :P) on Joomla! Arabic forum I’ve noticed the need for a mechanism that allows for “group” translation of extensions.

I thought about Version control systems (CVS/SVN) but they are not very “user-friendly”, Wikis was another option that offered many needed features like

• A good degree of user friendliness.
• Multi-user ready.
• Revisions.

But I needed a way to automatically import translation files “php files in Joomla!”, so I wrote this solution.
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parseInt() and leading zeros

I used parseInt() earlier to extract the number from a string coming for an input field, the numbers always had a leading zero, like “09 , 08, 07″ , When I sent these apparently “normal” and “easy-to-convert” values , parseInt() always returned 0! .

I had no doubts about parseInt() I thought it was my code that’s causing this problem, I double checked everything and I finally turned to parseInt() ,Everything seemed to work very well “Before” parseInt() enters.

I check w3schools and found this

If the radix parameter is omitted, JavaScript assumes the following:

* If the string begins with “0x”, the radix is 16 (hexadecimal)
* If the string begins with “0″, the radix is 8 (octal). This feature is deprecated
* If the string begins with any other value, the radix is 10 (decimal)

so if the string begins with “0″ , the radix is automatically assumed to be 8 (octal) but it seems that this feature is still Not deprecated on FF 2.0.0.4 (not sure about IE) .

To fix this I had to force parseInt() to use Decimal numeral system by explicitly specifying the radix (10).

Example:

Update June 9th 2007: I’ve came to discover that this issue is very well known and well documented all over the web , The funny thing is that Microsoft’s Solution is based on “manual” approach “that is using a loop that removes every leading ’0′ by string functions!”, although specifying the radix explicitly would solve the whole situation.

Arabic , PDF And Joomla!

Update August 2nd, 2007: I will be releasing this hack in the following few days Insha’Allah.

Update September 4th, 2007: I’ve released the code on SourceForge you can access it by checking out the CVS there.
The project url: http://sourceforge.net/projects/arabic-tcpdf

CVS Checkout command

It is a known fact that Joomla! 1.0.x can export content into pdf format, however, this feature doesn’t seem to be working well when used to export Arabic content to pdf format, either windows-1256 or UTF-8 encoded.

To address this issue, The guys at the Joomla! core has moved to TCPDF library to export pdf files, this library has support for images and more importantly UTF-8 which means it can -theoritaclly speaking- be used to handle pretty much ANY langauge, This is true for many Left-To-Right languages, however, For a Right-To-Left language like Arabic the situation is quite different I’ll try to brief the problem here.
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My First OpenGL Application on Linux

It is finally here, My first OpenGL application on Linux, I have written OpenGL code on Windows but this is the first time I do so on Linux, Yay for me! :)

What is it do? Well it is just a demo based on a particle system class I wrote few days ago, The particle system is configurable via text files, By modifying these text files you can configure particle behavior, gravity,speed along axes ,etc, and see your changes real-time without having to restart, you can find these files under the “particles” directory.

The demo is very primitive, it has NO frustum culling so it might run VERY slowly on Weak-hearted machines.

The demo uses this simple texturing class which in turns depend on FreeImage library to load textures.

.. One more thing , Here’s the function I used to generate random floating point numbers within a given range, I thought maybe someone would find it useful

The function could use more optimization “since it is called several thousands of times per frame”.

Particle System Demo [30.5 KB] (477 hits)

كيف تستعمل محركات البحث

لاحظت أن الكثير من زملائي في كلية الطب وغيرها يواجهون مشاكل في إيجاد ما يريدونه باستخدام محركات البحث بالاضافة الى عدم فهمهم لبعض مبادئ التعامل مع شبكة الإنرنت, لذلك بدأت و زميل لي في الكلية في كتابة ملخص يحوي معلومات عن كيفية استخدام محركات البحث بشكل فعال بالإضافة الى أشياء أخرى.
ملاحظة: الملف يستهدف في الأصل طلبة الطب ولذلك قد تصادف القارئ بعض الأمثلة ذات العلاقة بالعلوم الطبية وان كانت لن تعوق فهم محتوى الملف.
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Google is indexing flash files!

I’ve just came to notice that Google is actually indexing swf files,that is, it is parsing the text found within the file, It seems that this feature has been around for a while now, Think of all the wonderful things you can do with that, like fetching flashy illustrations for a hard to “visualize” subject like DNA synthesis through Google.

Maybe Google is not going “deep” within the file but I think the current “depth” is quite sufficient.

You might find these queries interesting

Astigmatism filetype:swf
Loop of henle filetype:swf