week 10 blog

This week I worked primarily on the presentation and the paper. For the presentation I helped create a powerpoint outlining different things such as motivation, technologies used, difficulties encountered, a time line of our progress, the different components of the project, etc. I had also created some slides to explain some of the code in my attempt at validation but in the end we decided not to present it. As for the paper, I am assigned to contribute to explaining the validation code, some of the potentially scalable aspects of our application (such as adding cover letters or increasing templates) and writing the up the conclusion once each of our respective parts are submitted. We are all contributing our parts through GoogleDocs and once we gather everyone's segments we will combine the paper and submit it on Tuesday.

week 9 post

After having nearly completed the client-side validation for the large resume form we have on the facebook application - using javascript - when it came to testing time on facebook, it didn't work. Facebook markup language did not allow for many of the javascript functions to work, such as get document.by.element.id, and so ultimately those many hours of calling different functions was in vain. Luckily, however, the server side validation with PHP was not too hard to implement. At first I attempted to use this tutorial: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/04/22/php_css_forms.html?page=2
to have the php page submit to itself, and begin validation only after the submit button was pressed, thus allowing for the validation to take place all in one page. However, it turns out that embedding php into id classes and id values within the form caused the whole form not to show up when uploaded onto our fileserver. Thus, even though this route seemed promising in its intuitiveness, I chose to go with a different route. Now upon "submitting" I am having the validation take place on another php file which "Gets" the data. I am also using !eregi to validate for things such as names, phone numbers, addresses, and I am using if(empty) to see if the fields are empty. The final step is to figure out how I will send the validated information through to the original php file that it was intended to go to in the first place.

late week 8 post

This week I tried making a template of the frontpage for the facebook application, but since it did not turn out aesthetically pleasing at all I do not think we will be using it for the project. So far we have completed most of the backend work involving php/mysql; one thing left, however, that we must complete is making the resume files submitted into html files, so that we can style them in different templates with css. Currently I am working on client-side form validation using javascript. I am using a variety of different tutorials in trying to figure out how to submit a php file using javascript, in addition to form validation. Tizag.com has been of some help, but I am still have difficulties getting my script to work properly. Last week (during week 8) I also looked through some mysql and php tutorials on tizag.com; it was very helpful in assisting me to comprehend the different sequences that are taking place for this application to work.