Hartti Suomela's Forum Nokia Blog

Table sorting with JavaScript

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:16:21 +0300

It has been again a few months since my last post. A few months? Really??? (Time flies, I have to agree...)

Anyhow, it has been even longer, way longer, since I did anything on the Web development side. My old pet project (national team statistics for Ultimate Frisbee... maybe more about that in a later post) has been suffering with crappy coding (naturally by yours truly) for years, and especially there has been no data updates for about 2 years (even though there has been quite a few games played within that period).

Last week I finally got some statistics updated online, and this week I started tinkering with my old code (undocumented of course... painful...). My first task was to find a way to sort HTML tables with JavaScript, so the users do not always need to wait for sorted data retireval from the server. The first script I bumped into was sorttable by Stuart Langridge. With this nifty script it was extremly easy to change the tables to use JavaScript based sorting: I just included the JavaScript code on the pages and added class="sortable" attribute in my HTML tables. (Ok. Ok. I also removed the old sorting links from the table header row and added some style definitions in the site's css-file, but that's it). Lo and behold, the table sorting worked. Very powerful and easy!

Unfortunately for me, the script lacked one important feature. It turned out to be impossible to create a header column for the data rows, which would not be sorted (row headers / row numbering). And off I went for some more googling.

After a few disappointments, I finally found a useful JavaScript library which solved my problem: Google Visualization API. Man, that API is powerful. It provided a very good solution for me for my table sorting problem (although it means a little more work for me, as I am forced to some more coding to change my direct HTML table code to use the JavaScript-based tables that the API uses), but it also contains very cool visualization tools (check for example Motion Chart and Annotated Time Line in the Gallery). Sure, I have not yet checked the licencing rights, which are likely a little stricter that what sorttable has, but I do not think this will cause any problems for my hobby project. And no, I have not yet taken this into use - that's the task for tomorrow I guess :-)

Test posting with lifeblog

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:23:01 +0300

Please ignore. Nothing interesting in here. Just a test post with atom interface and lifeblog

Do discussions, wiki, blogs and lobby feel faster for you?

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:08:40 +0300

They should. At least my browsing experience got much better a couple hours ago as we got a software update for the servers especially targeted for improving the performance of the services. (and yes, and there was some login issues yesterday on Forum Nokia platform in general which slowed things down even more)

Feel free to complain if you do not see any improvement in the response times (in that case please tell your browser and approximate location - like country - as well)

Insights through Nokia blogs

Sat, 03 May 2008 02:25:48 +0300

In addition to our Forum Nokia blogs there are number of other (even more?) interesting blogs from Nokia people. Here are a couple of suggestions of blogs providing nice insights...

Ari Jaaksi's blog. Ari is responsible for our Linux and open source based software and strategy. He writes in a leisurely pace, but always interesting stories, even when he is not writing about business...

Another open source related blog from a Nokia colleague. Again, not the most active blog, but posts usually make me think... like this one.

Of course there is also blogs on Java, like Gorkem's blog. Through that blog you can easily follow what is happening in eRCP-world, like here, here and here.

I hope you already been to Nokia betalabs...(I just downloaded SportsTracker from there and tested it already twice while rollerblading...coll stuff). Tommi has a blog in there too. The blog contains announcements of sw updates, like here for Nokia PC Phone but there are also interesting notes about other things around betalabs.

And finally, there are a number of interesting blogs at S60.com. Like this Carbide Dev Team blog. For example, have you updated to Carbide 1.3 yet? (I have not, but that's another story...)

Milestone for Flash Lite

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:31:27 +0200

As usual Biskero and chall3ng3r have reacted faster on Flash Lite news than I have, but here it goes: Bill Perry just noted on his blog, that more than half a billion devices have been shipped with Flash Lite. Impressive.

BOSSA Conference starting soon!

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 02:53:08 +0200

On this coming Sunday (March 16th) some lucky people will be in Porto de Galinhas to attend the BOSSA Conference. Lucky in two ways. 1) Who would not want to visit Brazil? And 2) the event program seems to be excellent.

For those of you who do not know, BOSSA is annual and international conference on open source software for mobile embedded platforms. According to a short email blurp I received just today from the organizers, about 200 people will attend the event. And there are some news articles already on this event - unfortunately in one of the languages I cannot read.

Wiki article ratings could be useful, if they were used...

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:19:46 +0200

Some time ago we added the possibility to rate articles on our Wiki. Every content page has two rating widgets at the top of the page. One for the for the quality and one for the expertise level (how demanding the article is).

Unfortunately those ratings have not been used much even though in the longer run those ratings could end up being useful tools for locating Wiki articles worth reading. Or articles in need of a total overhaul...

So next time you read an article in our wiki, please, spend few seconds of your time to rate the article you just read. Those few seconds will surely benefit other developers looking for answers.

Change in the Blogs' commenting system

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:24:28 +0200

Since we launched our new blog platform (LifeType) and changed the UI of our community section (blogs, discussion boards, wiki) in late October we have had commenting available for all blog readers (of course we had a spam filter in place) in order to make it easier for occasional readers to comment on the blogs and to make the blogs more lively.

However, as of today, we have turned that feature off. So all commenting will require the readers to log on to Forum Nokia (note, that this has been always the case with Forum Nokia discussion boards and wiki, so this aligns blogs with other services).

Why did return back to the old way of handling the blog comments (after all, this is how the earlier blog platform handled commenting)?

1) Automatic spammers kept on filling the system, and even though the spam filter worked very well, deleting the spam messages required efforts from all of the bloggers. Also in certain cases, valid comments were marked as spam.

2) Forum Nokia allows you now to stay logged on to the service for an extended period. So regular readers would be most likely already logged in for commenting.

I hope this allows our exiting bloggers spend more time on writing new and cool blog entries, instead of combing through the tens of spam comments trying to find out a potential gold nugget... and hence all readers will benefit.

Comments are welcome (and in case you want to comment but you do not want to register to Forum Nokia, you can send me email... guessing my Nokia email is not that hard, after all... Hint: first name is separated from the last name with a dot...)

Sorry for the short service break today!

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:47:58 +0200

Due to some configuration changes on our servers today the images on wiki and blogs were not available for a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience it might have caused to you!

Getting the page URLs from Java ME Developer's Library

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:54:19 +0200

Among the piles of emails I have received this week related to the launch of the new Forum Nokia Developer Community (and thank you everyone for the comments, please keep them coming!), there was an important tidbit of usability improvement in other parts of our online resources.

The online version of Java ME Developer's library has now three buttons above the content section (Sync URL, Sync TOC, and Hide/Show TOC). The left one is the most useful (in my opinion)

How to use it? After you have navigated to a certain page in the library and you would like to share the URL to that specific page, just click that button and magically the URL in the browser address bar is updated to direct link to this page (no need to copy the link location from the link itself...) Cool!