Funcoder Technology Blog

If you need to call a server process at regular intervals in your web page then this is actually a simple task that requires only a few lines of code and a little Ajax fun.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a page to display the current system time. It will show you the principles of how to perform this operation so you can then use it in your own web apps.

I firstly created a Dynamic WebDev App and added a page. On the page I added a Cell component and inside a Static Control which will display the time.

We are not going to be using any JavaScript for this, just some simple WL. Firstly we need to add a Timer to the browser load event.

Now remember this code is executed in the browser and not on the server so make sure you choose the correct event.

The code will call a WL method called CheckTheTime every second. You need to create a New Local Browser Procedure which the timer will call.

This is one of many things I love about WebDev, making AJAX calls is such  a breeze. So the code above will call a method on the server which will return the current system time as a string.

So now create a new Local Procedure (server side procedure) called GetTime. As you are making an AJAX call to this method you have to enable it to allow this type of action. Once again this is very simple, just click on the AJAX word at the top next to the method and the LED light will go green to show it has been enabled.

Then all you have to do is write the code which returns time time.

That’s it, you are done. Running the page will now display the current time and will automatically refresh every second.

UPDATE!!

This afternoon I received a telephone call from Claudia at PC Soft. She discussed my comments in this blog post and explained about some of the benefits we have received from a later version which included more examples translated to English.

I reiterated about the number of bugs we are getting with this new version and Claudia has asked for you to please send bug reports to PC Soft so that they can investigate them.

She also wants to hear from you if you are having any issues with PC Soft or concerns about bugs not being resolved. Please contact Claudia at claudia.rivera@pcsoft.fr and help her to understand any issues you have.

I discussed about the bugs that developers are complaining about in the latest version

I have been developing applications and websites in WinDev / WebDev for the past 2 years. So why this question now?

Well we have seen the release of Version 14 at the beginning of this month, 6 months after the French release. Come on now PC Soft, 6 months is a lifetime in the technology industry. If they were really committed to expanding then you would see the English version created in parallel to the French.

If you look at other development tools, many produce multi-lingual versions and release them at the same time.

Maybe its a problem with their codebase which makes it complicated to created multi-lingual versions, but surely they would be working towards resolving this.

The other issue is the lack of communication between the community and PC Soft. The www.windev.com website it pretty much stagnant with no focus on providing information about news, tips etc.

What about LST? Why do they not produce an English version?

Don’t get me wrong, I love programming in WinDev but I feel it is a very lonely experience. I am also finding it harder to convince clients their are other developers that can support the systems I write. I know there are some but we are talking so much less than there should be.

WinDev 14 has made me re-think about this product, not only for the 6 months wait but then the quality. Every day I come across a bug which is driving me nuts.

The new version has all these new information messages to help you build quality code, but it generates these errors even on PC Soft’s own RAD classes.

I don’t want to move back to .NET but its looking more that I will have to. It’s sad as I have already started writing a WinDev book but what should I do?

I think now it the time for the powers at PC Soft to speak up and be more open about their future plans.

We’ll there’s my rant and you are welcome to disagree. Leave a comment and maybe we can make PC Soft aware of our feelings and hope they will become more involved in the community.

With May now approaching the hopeful release of WinDEV, WebDEV and WinDev Mobile 14 is on its way.

Here’s my Top 10 new feratures I am so looking forward to in this release:

1. Container Columns in Table

You can now add controls into cells to make some incredible table views. Tables are my favorite control in WinDEV 12, especially when I look back to my .NET days and the amount of code I had to write. Happy days!

2. Google Apps Integration

We have some great plans for using the Google maps integration in WinDEV. I know this was possible before by hacking some code together, but once again PC Soft have made it a breeze to implement.

3.  Widescreen Environment

I use a 20” screen for my development and always have WinDEV maximized to cover the whole screen. Now the IDE has more improvements to allow for better use of the space.

4.  Class Data Binding

You can now drag a class into a window to create corresponding controls and bind them together.

5. Monitoring Tool

You can monitor the availability of your systems, including http servers, WinDEV and WebDev applications. Email messages can be configured to alert you when problems occur.

6. New RTF Formatting Buttons

The RTF features in version 12 were OK but I really wanted more functionality.  They have moved forward a little bit adding justification but I still feel we have a way to go on this one.

7. Controlling Devices Around the Home

WinDEV 14 now has support for domotics CM15. I know this is a bit of a geeky feature for me to be excited about. But being able to control devices around my home from my WinDEV apps is very cool.

8. RSS Feed Parsing Engine

There are a number of new commands I can use to load an RSS feed and parse it. You can do this with the XML parser but now I can do it with just a few methods.

9. HTTP Functions for Processing Forms

In certain applications I have needed automatically fill out web forms, which is not an easy task. Not until now that is, as there are new simple HTTP methods to build the form and send it.

10. No Declaring Arrays as Zero Length

This was just an annoying feature in Wlanguage but now you don’t need to specify zero when declaring an array.

PROCEDURE MyProcedure(ArrStrings is array of strings)

I have created a quick video showing how to use guidelines to manage the boundaries of your page while you are laying it out.

This was accidently found the other day when I clicked on the rule.

Well you learn something new every day when using WebDEV. I have been developing a number of sites for Google Adword campaigns, which need optimizing. What I didn’t realise until this morning is that WebDEV has an optimization wizard built in.

Below you can see some suggestions WebDEV has made after I ran the wizard.

To run the optimization, just open one of your pages and select the menu Page / Optimize the Referencing of Page.

If you double click on one of the suggestions it will take you to that setting so you can make the required changes.

Very cool…

As you probably noticed from the posts on my blog I am creating more websites lately for clients.

I wanted to make this post to make a point about one issue I have with the HTML code that WebDEV creates.

As a test I created a simple page in WebDEV and Dreamweaver 8. Here’s the page I built:

Now the old style way to build a page is using TABLE elements, but that’s just not done now. It causes all sorts of complications with compatibility with browsers, even though WebDEV has some compatibility functionality.

As you can see in the above source code generated, WebDEV builds the layout around tables which is really horrid.

I would love to see WebDEV take a leaf out of the Dreamweaver book. I created the same design in Dreamweaver 8:

As you can see the code that Dreamweaver produces is so much cleaner and will also load faster as it is using CSS to layout the page. This is the code I want to see WebDEV produce, clean, quick and modern.

What do you think? What are your views on this?

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Here’s another example for some Internet Marketing work I did a few days ago. It’s a landing page for an Affiliate to promote a Guitar course.

Building the layout was very easy as I just use drag and drop with some additional bits of code for the flash streaming of audio testimonials.

One of the other things that WebDEV is that the IDE lends itself to help me optimise the page for SEO.

You can tell I’m having fun with this… On to the next Project…

I do a lot of development for Internet Marketers and for some reason didn’t think of WebDEV as a platform for me to develop on. I have been using Dreamweaver to do all my work.

Now I have switched and code all my client sites in WebDEV. Its so much more fun now and I tend to be a lot more creative in this tool.

There are a few issues I have come across when integrating with Aweber.com Form code but I have found ways around this.

This is an example Squeeze Page that only took me 30 minutes to complete and upload.

It can be a little confusing at first when you are trying to get the cell control to expand.

The first step is to set the Cell to 100% width and height. But there are also outer parameters that need to be set to 100%, as shown in the screen shot below:

The original point of creating my blog was to have fun with software development, but time has not been on my side.

Today I decided it was time to have some fun, so I wanted to see if WEBDEV would allow me to integrate JQuery.

The idea was to just create a simple page which I could call a JQuery scroll-up effect on some text. I wanted to do this with a Dynamic WEBDEV application as this is where I spend most of my web development time using.

I created a static control inside a cell. There’s some HTML DIV tags you need to set in the controls.

Firstly the cell description dialog you need to add the html in the advanced section. It’s only a couple of lines.

The DIV class name then can be referenced in the JQuery method.

You also need to add a paragraph tag to the static control.

Then the final thing to do is add some JavaScript code to the button. If your code window is in WL language mode   then you need to click on the WL to change it to JavaScript .

Now all you need to do is add your JQuery JavaScript code:

$("div.contentToChange p.firstparagraph:visible").slideUp("slow");

There is one final part to this code. We need to tell WEBDEV where the JQuery JavaScript library is. There are a few places you can do that, by downloading the library and telling the project where the JavaScript file is or for my simple experiment I have included the html to reference the JavaScript libraty from the Page Description dialog, as seen below:

Now you can run the Web App page, click on the button and you will see the text scroll away.

If you have any more experience of question using JQuery with WEBDEV please post a comment so that others can learn.