The DOM has been a part of our webpages from the beginning, and since the earliest browsers there have always been certain things we wanted, but couldn’t get from the DOM; and other things we wanted to hide. The shadow DOM is designed exactly for that, it hides DOM subtrees under shadow roots, giving you a method of creating a better and more functional encapsulation in the DOM. Browser support ... This functionality is very much new and experimental so it’s only available at the moment in Chrome 25+...
In our final article on Gumby, I will talk to you about the extensions Gumby provides. They aren’t included in the main framework to make it more lightweight but you can install them separately to make your coding even easier. Bower ... These extensions should be installed with bower , if you have never heard of Bower it is basically, as their github page says, ‘a package manager for the web’. It allows you to install registered packages with just a simple command and to install it yourself you will...
In our last article about Gumby you saw the fundamentals of this robust framework, but we also have a lot of JavaScript components we can use via the JavaScript UI for Gumby. Today, we’ll take a look at these components. Toggles & switches ... A lot of what Gumby focuses on is minimizing the amount of JavaScript we need to write. Toggles and switches look at the gumby-trigger attribute and the element you enter as the value of this attribute will have the .active class toggled. You can use this to toggle...
File uploads are something that, as developers, we have had to do for years and getting an ajax file uploader is always a better choice than redirecting the user to an upload page or even just reloading the page; keeping the user on the same page will improve the usability of your application. Today we will be creating a simple ajax file uploader with drag and drop support. The plugin ... In this example I will be using the jQuery Upload File Plugin because it’s a simple to use and robust plugin that will get...
As web developers, it’s usual to have a favorite framework that we use for virtually every project. There are certainly plenty to choose from. Today I’d like to try and persuade you to switch to one of mine. Gumby is a flexible framework developed with Sass that comes with a whole bunch of extensions and JavaScript helpers. It’s been growing in popularity for some time and for good reasons. The grid ... The first thing to check out when considering a framework is the grid system being used by the framework....
One area we always have some difficulty when it comes to styling is input fields and in particular the file input. This type of input doesn't usually allow for much customization but with some JavaScript tricks we can create our own file input that matches our website's look and feel. The HTML ... Using the default HTML element for file input we can't create much so in this article we will create our file input that will be hidden and we will create another button that with some javascript magic will...
If you use a task runner in your workflow you’ll know why they are so useful in coding; they improve our workflow and allow us to focus on problem solving rather than repetitive data entry. Gulp is one such application and it has a lot of benefits to it. There’s a really simple syntax, no messy JavaScript files, a simple API and a wide variety of plugins. Installing Gulp ... As you’ll suspect if you’ve used a utility like this before, you need to have NodeJS and npm installed on your system, once you...
Test driven development is now widely accepted as a JavaScript workflow, and it’s something we should all embrace because it saves us a great deal of time when coding. In this article I’ll introduce you to QUnit, a testing framework that will help you spot errors and bugs in your code. Why use test driven development? ... At first, this process may seem complex and tedious. Creating a test for all of your functions does take some time, but it will save you hours of debugging at the end of the project cycle....