#w6d4

[shinkaneweek]

[worldsokayestmother]

W6 / D4

Denmarks Heath board just announced that from march 1st, moms-to-be get the option to have a NIPT blood test done to look for Down's syndrome (and other chromosome abnormalities). That's a lot safer than the previous 'needle to stomach' approach. I should be just shy of 12 weeks about that time. Which is perfect timing!

[and-megan-blog]

W6D4

I decided I needed to stay home today after being unable to sleep for more than 3 hours for several days in a row. My memory was completely shot and I felt physically ill. I feel a lot better and ready to learn tomorrow.

shutting my eyelids

carries me away to dreams

all composed of code

[dylanmeacham-blog]

App Academy: Week 6, Day 4

Today we built JQuery Lite using only methods from the DOM. Amongst the functions that we implemented were JQuery's convenience $ method for selecting elements from the DOM, taking in an HTMLElement and turning it into a DOMNodeCollection object, and for wrapping a JavaScript script so that it only executes once the whole DOM has loaded. We also wrote functions for injecting inline HTML into elements selected using $, getting all of the children (including childrens' children, childrens' childrens' children, and so on) of selected elements, removing elements from the DOM completely, and appending new HTML elements to the end of a selection. In addition, we added event listeners to our JQuery Lite, so that we can write scripts to respond to events occuring in the DOM.

Last, we implemented a lite version of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) in our JQuery Lite using the DOM's XMLHttpRequest object. Our $.ajax function takes an argument of an object specifying the parameters for the ajax request to be executed, which parameters are then fed into the XMLHttpRequest's open function, headers, and send function depending on what the parameters are. In this way, our JQuery Lite gains the ability to query web pages without having to refresh the browser.

Outside of today's project, I also learned about event delegation in JQuery. When you attach an event listener to an element of the DOM using JQuery, the listener will detect whenever the specified event occurs either on the element it was attached to itself, or on any of that element's children. By default, the element the listener was attached to will be currentTarget in the resultant event object passed into the listener's callback, whereas the element on which the event actually occured will be target. However, if I later add more elements to the DOM that I want to listen for events in the same way, they won't have the event listener attached to them. Thus, for any such elements, we should attach our listener to the parent element of whatever group we'd like to listen on. This way, when we add more elements to that group, the event will "bubble up" to the parent element, triggering an invocation of its callback. However, we might want currentTarget in the event object to still be the children of that parent element, rather than the parent itself. In this case, we can simply add a selector as the second argument to our event listener when attaching it, which will set currentTarget equal to an element that matches it from which the event bubbled up.

[keldonia]

Snakes on a Browser - w6d4;

Today we build jQuery from pure JavaScript and used it to build snake. It was cool.

[finalpen]

jQuery lite!

Today was a blast. It was really engaging, and I felt like I gained a better understanding of what jQuery is actually doing. We finished the core of the assignment, selecting HTML elements, modifying the DOM, and making AJAX requests (though it’s really JSON). We even made a cool color-changing weather page that queries a weather API and displays the weather, and the background fades from blue to red depending on the temperature. I feel like these intensive projects will help me be better prepared in the job world.

[ieverythingistakenup-blog]

JavaScript Event Delegation and Triggering; jQuery-Lite

Today we built a simplified jQuery, jQuery-Lite, using native JavaScript code. After writing the code, a lot of the utility of jQuery seemed to be implicit iteration. I think jQuery seemed to be more relevant in the past maybe, as, if modern browsers used standardized api’s similar to MDN JavaScript documentation, there doesn’t seem to be that much added value from jQuery. I could be wrong. It was fun though, especially the event triggering we did. For functions wrapped by jQuery, invocation occurs after the document has fully loaded. Learning how to accomplish that by using event “DOMFullyLoaded” and triggering was pretty fun, and I can see a lot of utility from it. 

[haasalex16]

W6D4

Today we continued with JQuery by creating plug ins for a fading info box and an image carousel. Doing the design with CSS and HTML wasn't too tough but the difficulty came when properly using JQuery to handle events and transitions. In order to help handle everything we utilized the .on and .one functions as well as the use of 'transitionend' which are all really cool JQuery tricks. Tomorrow we will start to combine everything we have learned back into Rails so it will be very interesting to see how everything will come together.