Carl Backstrom's Blog

CSS is extremely important in web development and this page has a huge
list of CSS tools both to uhhh .... borrow .... other sites CSS
ideas and to help you build your own.

http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com/2006/10/the_complete_li.html

A bunch of prepackaged applications have been released by the Application Express team.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/packaged_apps/packaged_apps.html

I especially like the Document Library because of some of the AJAX and DHTML I helped out with.

Especially my new $xml_Control(pThis) object.  You'll
be seeing much more of this , and probably a code example as well, because
it's just so useful. In short it takes care of one of the major problems of updating multiple parts of page at same time, it's also an easy way to move complex data constructs to the client and query them for data,  I have all sorts of ideas for this one ;).

Well since everyone else is at OW I get to keep working along
at things, like continuing to hurt my head on regular expressions for
the Wiki application and finishing up some code examples.

Now I'm not saying Internet Explorer sucks, but but 12.46% of us are!  Yo Bill I have two words ... Standards and Standards

>>>>
New browser usage statistics are out for September, and they're showing
some interesting changes in browser market share. Internet Explorer,
which has been the market share king for many years now, has been
falling steadily since the launch of Firefox 1.0 and has now reached
its lowest point in over two years at 82.10 percent. Firefox, on the
other hand, has been growing steadily, reaching 12.46 percent market
share. Safari holds its third place spot, but sees increasing numbers
as well at 3.53 percent.
>>>>

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061010-7949.html

Sometimes it's amazing how much you can work with some technology and just miss some of the fundamentals.

I use PL/SQL and the htp.p() and htp.prn() functions all the time but
never really noticed the difference between the two, which isn't huge till it bites you when your trying to do something.

So what's the difference do you ask?

htp.prn() inserts a newline after printing it's string
htp.p() does not insert a new line.

Why would it make a difference do you ask? Well just try to get exactly
that XML feed you need without picking the right one, from personal
experience sometimes you'll be tearing your hair out for hours.  

Take a look here http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:54 for a quick visual example.

Another thing I learned today was some Regular Expressions, I've never
really gotten my head around them but in working on the OPEN Apex Wiki
I need to and am slowly learning.

I found these couple threads in the OTN forums by cd
to be very valuable and am eagerly awaiting Part 3.

Part 1: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=427716
Part 2: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=430647

I even created my own simple example
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:52 to quickly test out
different REGEXP_REPLACE() examples hopefully someone else finds it
useful.

Learning a couple new things on a random Tuesday isn't bad , now to just keep from forgetting them by tomorrow : ).



Finally though it's a little late I had a new code example (Save Large
Value) uploaded to the Sample Code Section of the Application Express
area of OTN.
I'm pretty happy with this example as it is being used on multiple of
the packaged applications we will be providing and will most likely
make it into the product. It's fairly simple widget that gets around a
pretty large shortcoming of PL/SQL.



I'm almost done with my Show/Hide regions with memory and Ajax
Collection Control examples as well. Show/Hide regions with memory is
something that people always ask for and the Ajax
Collection Control is a basic piece of functionality for Application
Express that will allow people to build very complex and robust Ajax
functionality,



Carl

Look I return results in the new google code search program.

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%27Carl+Backstrom

Not alot to be sure but it's still pretty cool, I need to search for some of my old user names and see what else comes up.

Carl