Sebastian Grant

Supposedly, 2010 is going to be the year that web developers (and hopefully designers) are going to embrace the power of HTML 5 & CSS 3 and obviously, in order for any of these cool new technologies to actually be visible to the user, our browsers are going to need to implement the rendering of them. As we all know, Firefox is ahead of the game when it comes to implementing new features – whether they’ve been approved by the W3C or not, those wonderful guys over at Mozilla tend to write the code if they like a feature. Safari/Chrome aren’t far behind either (WebKit being my favourite of the rendering engines) it’s only one browser that… do I even need to finish this sentence??

So last night Firefox 3.6 was released and as a diligent web developer, I headed over to firefox.com, downloaded it and added it to my ever-growing list of “browsers I need to keep to test my sites on.” This time, however, I read the FULL feature list rather than just skim reading the exciting stuff and this has prompted me to analyse the latest few versions, the upcoming “cool stuff” in HTML 5 and CSS 3 and draw comparisons, once again, between the different web browsers.

In my last post I described why I love Grails Taglibs and how they increase productivity, reduce the amount of code in GSPs (therefore reducing maintenance time) and help to keep your code consistent; this post, as promised, is aimed at PHP developers moving over to Grails and will show newbies how to use Taglibs and reduce your coding time and re-used code.

When writing your application, you will quickly come across blocks of code that you will re-use – in fact, a good indicator of this is the over use of CMD-V (or Ctrl-V for those developers still using Windows) – these will be the first methods in your taglib.

We shall use the DVD Library from my last post to illustrate how I would begin and a couple of example methods within the taglib itself. Before we begin, I’ll quickly describe namespaces and what they mean for taglibs.

At enotions, we have a team of designers, developers and project managers to get a project from initial concept, through design, programming and front end build and ultimately out to the client – hopefully on time and on budget; this has evolved over the years and is now working rather nicely. On the flip side, any projects I work on for personal enjoyment and edification don’t get the benefit of said team and so personal projects often have to be built with little documentation and in such a way that they "do work, but could do with refinement" – I like to think of it as a form of Agile Programming but without anyone else backing me up or checking up on me (and certainly no Scrum Master to be seen!).