Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I'd had the idea that I should add a "reading progress" indicator to my blog posts for a while now, and I finally got around to adding it the other weekend. What I'd assumed would be a five minute job had an interesting issue I thought I should document for others...
I'm not much of a front-end person. While I can do JavaScript and CSS if I need to, I tend to have to spend quite a bit of time in Google remembering all the key facts. But every so often I find myself needing to do some client-side code, so anything that can make that job easier seems like an interesting idea. Recently I came across the htmx framework - which offers a way to do common AJAX-like dynamic front-end tasks with little ceremony, and pretty much zero JavaScript. So I figured I should have a hack about and see if it's of any use with the sort of "traditional" Sitecore I'm confident with...
I'll be honest – I don't do much front-end stuff. I've watched the odd PluralSight course on modern JavaScript, I've worked out the basics of Gulp, and I can hack together a VueJS UI if I need to. But it's certainly not something I'd ever say I was good at. But despite being offically a C# developer, occasionally I find myself looking at bug tickets that relate to some front-end code. I had one of them this week, where some javascript had stopped working. The front-end dev was stuck, so I took a look – and discovered something new. Well new to me at least...
News stories about hacking and malware are depressingly common these days. Here in the UK I think we've not really dealt with all the fall-out from last May when parts of our health service (along with many other businesses) were hit by the "Wannacry" ransomware worm. Yet another security incident happened the other day which will get less press coverage (since it's nowhere near as dramatic) but has bigger implications for us as web develelopers...
My work sometimes involves picking up projects that were started by other developers / agencies and making changes or enhancements. Sometimes the approaches used by the original developers can make these enhancements harder than they need to be. The HTML, CSS and Javascript of a recent project I worked on caused some issues that I thought were worth calling out to try and help developers do better work in the future.
A while back I wrote up the faceted search example I'd presented at the London Sitecore User Group, and commented that ASP.Net WebForms wasn't really great technology for providing that sort of UI. I noted that it would work better if it could be implemented using Ajax-style UI.
Having finally had a chance to work out a basic pattern for building JSON web services using the sort of technology that's easily available in basic Sitecore 6.6 websites last week, I've now had a chance to get around to implementing a prototype of how the faceted search might be built with client-side processing.
