Fresh Baked Goodness with the YUI Cookie Utility

Cookies provide an essential service to web developers, giving us a quick way of deciding whether someone has visited our site before and allowing us to tailor the site to them in some simple way if they have, by providing a welcome message, or by putting any moveable elements into a particular configuration for example. The only problem with cookies is not that they are particularly hard to work with, it's just that they're so cumbersome to code for, as anyone that's used them will know.

Thankfully, the YUI provides us with an easy way of setting and getting cookie data, which abstracts away the strict syntax and dramatically shortens our scripts which is a very good thing considering even the most basic functions for getting and setting cookie data are often in excess of 20 lines of plain-vanilla JavaScript, even without error checking that prevents an error being thrown if document.cookie is empty.

Throughout this tutorial I'm going to be assuming that you've worked with cookies before the old fashioned way and understand the principles behind their use. Even if you've never worked directly with cookies before however you should still be able to use the YUI Cookie utility without any difficulties. The examples in this tutorial have been tested on a variety of the most common web browsers in use today, but only on the Windows platform. You should note that these examples do not work seem to work in Google Chrome.

Intelligent YUI Resource Loading with YUI Loader

In my last article we looked at the YUI Get utility, something constructed for the sole purpose of dynamically adding additional script or CSS resources to a page after it has loaded. Following on from this we’re going to take a look at the YUI Loader, a very similar utility with a very similar purpose.

YUI Get will indiscriminately get the files you specify but the big difference with YUI loader is that it has been designed to specifically get YUI files. YUI Loader is an intelligent utility that saves you having to include or specify all of the necessary individual files and dependencies for any component; you simply tell it the component(s) you wish to use and it looks at what YUI content exists on the page, and then adds anything else need to make the component work.

Getting Resources with YUI Get

The YUI Get utility is a relatively recent addition to the growing suite of developer tools that come under the YUI family. Its only purpose is to allow us to dynamically add new CSS or script resources after a page has loaded. Why would we want to do this? There are many reasons, but the most prominent would probably include Progressive Enhancement,Lazy Loading, Cross Domain Data Resources.

MS SQL Virtual Table

Imagine that you have two tables inside a MS SQL database and you want to have them combined and displayed as one table. This is possible with a view statement provided by the different database engines. In this movie we will show you how to make a virtual table from two MS SQL tables and present the result in a DMXzone Ajax DataGrid.