Recently I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with Bing Maps. Not every page on the site requires the map API so we’ve been attempting to use require.js, which we already have, to maintain that dependancy. As usual it’s more complicated than we’d hoped. Bing Maps provides a callback hook that we can use… Read more »
An alternative to jQuery.load
Note: Are you looking to use jquery.ajax rather than jquery.load? Click here. The post below talks about using an iFrame as an alternative to AJAX. A very long time ago, 2010 maybe, I was asked to build a site with an “app like feel”, which seemed to mean “we don’t like page refreshes”. At the… Read more »
Interactive Development Standards
I’ve recently been contributing to a set of front-end standards for Sapient, you can see the results at bp.sapient-lab.com. It’s a working document that will hopefully evolve over time. My focus was on the organisation of JavaScript. It was a more complicated task than I’d anticipated as I couldn’t assume that our developers were all… Read more »
Mediaelement.js Flash fallback pain.
Recently I’ve been working a lot with mediaelement.js, much more than I’d hoped to have to have done with a module that promises so much. The biggest issue I faced was changing the video src in the Flash fallback player as when you change the source the new video isn’t loaded until it is played…. Read more »
Buzzwords and the layman
Web development is a weird specialty. There are reams of excellent articles and references by writers often evangelical about how the web should be built, from the tools you use, through the way you code it to the servers it’s sits on. There can be no profession more open than web development, literally everything you… Read more »
Making session storage play nicely with server side sessions
Session and local storage have made the storage of data on a clients machine respectable, gone are the big cookies and window.name, partnered with the ability to define manifest files developers can now exert control over how resources and data are cached to a level that makes Apache and IIS look embarrassing. However, with every… Read more »
"The Web Behind the Medium" – An article for the Idea Engineers Blog
Over the past few months I’ve been amazed at how simple it can be to reuse the same code and structures on quite different devices. When I was asked to write an article for Sapient’s Idea Engineer blog I straight away knew that was what I wanted to talk about. The purpose of the article… Read more »
Hashbangs, useful, but probably not what you want
In the modern web AJAX is the workhorse behind the interactions. CSS3 might add the shine but AJAX is still doing the work. The strength of AJAX is that it’s a background request, the UI will ignore them completely, which is fantastic unless you’ve just ripped out the hole page content and replaced it with… Read more »
Open up to better project tools
Project tools are there to support the project. If those tools are sub-standard then it’s likely they will cost your team time and raise their irritation levels. An annoyed developer is a dangerous thing, we’re fully capable of complaining about minor things for hours so imagine what seriously crap bit of software can do. When… Read more »
Looseideas in 2011
I’ve made a few changes to this site recently, the blog is now upfront and the old “content” has gone. Previously I maintained this site to pad out my portfolio, but since working at Sapient I’ve ignored and patched it until the code is mush From now on it’s going to have a change of… Read more »