I haven’t posted for a while. I’ve been really busy, since Friday at least. I’m doing a job that involves JavaScript like nothing I’ve ever done before. It relies on the browser to do many of the things that I would always do in PHP: validation, persistence and selective content. But I’m not paying, so you say jump…

Writing the validation and the session management was interesting. I have recently mastered the writing of JavaScript objects, having never really seen the point before I now tend to code as an object by default, whether in PHP, JavaScript or any other language. The objects I created are great, like all objects just include the file and call a couple of methods. The session management I particularly like, it apes PHP/ASP session code and to use is almost identical to JavaScript ASP, with session.get(key) and session.set(key, value) functions, the object also rips the values from a named form if you want it to.

The validation is a rip-off of the validation class I use in PHP, which came from a tutorial on DevShed. It too benefits from being a workalike of a tested solution.

Today I was messing around with window.open and started experimenting with interaction between windows. Because JavaScript is a so-called prototype language (I know of no others), any object can have properties and methods added at run-time. I found that by adding a popup property to the window object, opening a new window with window.open and then getting the content of the new window to refer to document.opener.popup I could transfer content for a popup window from the main window. This is quite useful as the work I’m doing at the moment has a fairly large number of popup windows, all with similar content. This way I can use a single popup template and write the content in when I need it.