The Author – Bart Busschots
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Feb
23
PBS 72 of X — HTML5 Templates
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on February 23, 2019 | 2 Comments
Templating is a very important concept to get to grips with as you move from web pages to web apps. You need the ability to design some generic HTML and then easily inject data into it. Every UI popup has a standard form, but the information being displayed changes each time its invoked. Similarly, apps often use some kind of card interface to show a collection of similar items, those are basically the same piece of HTML being re-used with different data over and over again. Clearly, you want to be able to easily create a template for one card, and then re-use it over and over again.
I’ve been trying to find the perfect moment to insert this topic into the series, and it struck me that Bootstrap Toasts would make a simple but informative example around which to introduce the topic. So far we’ve been generating toasts by building them up piece-by-piece with jQuery, starting with a tag, setting the text, setting some attributes and properties, adding some classes, appending tags together, and so on. The code works, but it’s cumbersome to write, and worse still, difficult to debug and maintain. Hopefully you’ve been thinking to yourself ‘there must be a better way?’, because if you have been, you’ll be very well motivated to ingest this instalment!
You can download this instalment’s ZIP file here.
Feb
9
PBS 71 of X — Bootstrap Spinners
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on February 9, 2019 | 1 Comment
The challenge set at the end of the previous instalment was to build a simple timer web app. This was a much more substantial challenge than those I’ve been setting in the previous handful of instalments, and in involved re-familiarising yourself with concepts we’ve learned before, but not used for some time. For those reasons this instalment will primarily revolve around my sample solution to the challenge. I’ll go through it in much greater detail than I have been doing recently.
It would be a shame to go through an entire instalment without any new content though, so we also meet one very simple but very useful little Bootstrap component, the Spinner. Learning about the spinner sets us up nicely for a new challenge — two simple but important improvement to the timer web app we just built.
You can download this instalment’s ZIP file here.