I finally got around to submitting a paper for Dreamforce 2010. The title…..wait for it……wait…..”Take Your Visualforce Pages to the Next Level with jQuery & jQuery UI”.
Visualforce is great for building solid and scalable web apps. Where it falls short is enhanced web 2.0 (I actually cringe at this term) usability. It lays a solid foundation but lacks slick UI features that users of today’s web expect and will soon demand. jQuery and jQuery UI make it incredibly easy to add enhanced functionality. In this presentation I will show best practices, pitfalls to watch out for, and of course show off some slick apps that use jQuery. What this won’t be is an advanced deep dive on jQuery. This presentation will show anyone who has a little web and Visualforce experience how to apply jQuery to projects they are working on as soon as they get back to work.
Salesforce has seriously pushed Flex the last few years but I guarantee you that 90% of the time I can build the exact same functionality in less lines of code with jQuery. It’s time to show some diversity at Dreamforce. Simply look at this trend for google searches.
jQuery is the most popular javascript library out there today and it even beats Adobe Flex in terms of people looking for more information. If Flex gets a dedicated session at Dreamforce so should jQuery!
If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I’ve got a quirky style with a touch of humor thrown in there. I’ll be sure to carry this over to my presentation unless salesforce makes me be all serious and professional, BORING.
If you like this idea please hit the link below and cast your vote.
Popups suck. Everyone hates them, but it wasn’t always like this. There once once a time long long ago when popup actually displayed relevant information related to the site you were browsing. This was in a time before tabbed browsing and advertising behemoths. Then came advertising on the web and popups galore. Here begins the downfall of the popup. It wasn’t long before popups became incredibly annoying and web users closed them without a glance. Popups were used, abused, and are now the scum of the internet user experience.
So why this brief, and quite frankly masterfully written story on the history of popups? The help link you can add to Visualforce pages is a popup. There are a few reasons I don’t like this. One, it is a popup, and people hate popups. Two, you also have to manage an entirely separate page for what could be a very simple help dialog. And 3, it just doesn’t provide a good user experience. It feels so 1999. Read more…
To be honest I sort of feel bad about writing this post. I have already reviewed, ranted about, and tweaked the new salesforce.com UI, but here comes my third consecutive post related to this. I promise my next post will be about something super cool and radtaculous you can do with salesforce!
We hoped to enable the new UI in the next few weeks and like any good admin or developer I checked all of our custom Visualforce pages to make sure everything still looked and worked correctly. Everything started out so smooth. Everything was looking good. My basic, and for the most part, static Visualforce pages seem to work fine.
A while back Jeff Douglas posted on his blog how to embed a Flex slider into a visualforce page. This is pretty slick and can be really useful, but I’m not a really a fan of Flex (I’ll post about that later) so today let’s look at doing the same thing a little different.
Instead of using Flex to build the slider I will show you how to do this with javascript. This requires less code and I feel it is easier to implement.
We are going to add a super nifty ultra slick slider withonly 16 lines of javascript code.
My posts have been lacking lately but in the next few weeks I plan on creating some super slick demos that mix jQuery and Force.com into a delicious concoction of wonderfulness. Before I do this I’d like to go over the basics of setting up jQuery to play nice with Force.com (or salesforce.com, all the same).
If all we need is jQuery, the first thing we need to do is download it here here: http://jquery.com/.
There will be two versions, one is considered production and the other development. These actually contain the same code but the production file removes all unnecessary spaces.
This smaller version allows the script to be downloaded quicker by users viewing the page and will provide a better user experience to those with less bandwidth. Read more…
Take Your Visualforce Pages to the Next Level with jQuery & jQuery UI
