I let iGoogle move in about six months ago, mostly for the calendar and Gmail, and then I began to notice how popular the gadgets were. 1.3 million people have added Quotes of the Day, 500 thousand people subscribe to Current Moon Phase (huh?), and 14 million people are using Weather. To get a sense of these numbers, 3.5 million people use Gmail.
So I decided that my first project, post high school teaching, would be to write a gadget. The Google developer's guide indicated that the tools were JavaScript and XML, both of which I wanted to learn more about. Of course, this also seemed like a way of paying homage to our new master.
Prior to the gadget, I had assumed that JavaScript was a minor player in the HTML world, a way to add small decorations to your web page. For my son's web site, for example, I had written a few lines of code that displayed his current age on the main page. This became, in fact, the genesis for the gadget - Age Gauge - which would display a picture of your child (or grandchild, spouse) and their current age, in a variety of formats.
But JavaScript turns out to be a complete programming language, almost object oriented, that gives you powerful tools for manipulating the web display on the client side. Translation: it happens right in your browser, so you don't have the sluggishness associated with a server conversation. The technical name for JavaScript, by the way, is ECMAScript, which nobody uses. It sounds too much like a skin disease.
I'm not going to get into details of the programming here; you can get the code and a limited amount of documentation on the examples page. Instead, I want to describe a couple of ways in which the development process now differs from what I was doing in the previous century.
In 1998 and before, most of the time I was working with one language, and the languages were compact. C, for example, has something like fourteen words, and I can say anything I want to with those fourteen. Perl, by contrast, not only starts big (I'm not going to say a word about regular expressions), but seems to get bigger every five minutes. Want to (fill in the blank)? There's a package that does just that. In addition, I now use three or four languages daily, and the differences between them often lead me astray. In Perl, for example, "if statements" need braces; nobody else cares. JavaScript and Flash concatenate strings with plus, Perl and PHP with a dot.
The solution to this verbosity, of course, is Lord Google. I usually don't even bother going to the online language references. It takes too many clicks. I just ask Google to find "javascript concatenate strings" and the first or second hit gives me the answer.
Which leads me to the second big change in programming. If I didn't know the answer to a problem in 1998, and the guy down the hall didn't either, then I dug in and figured it out. The one book on my shelf was The C Programming Language. Now help is everywhere. When I was writing my second gadget, I hit an obscure snag related to communication between Flash and JavaScript. When I posted this question on a message board, someone was kind enough to write back the same day.
Even more than the message boards, examples abound. Before I wrote a line of code for Age Gauge, or even thought about it very much, I downloaded and dissected the source to Google's Todo gadget. The examples not only outline the general landscape of the problem, but they also give you the gritty details. In Todo, for example, I learned how to detect that an Enter key was pressed in various browsers.
Next week: Flash.
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