Critical Adjustments

A Handful of Crucial Website Changes

The upcoming project was beginning to suffer from scope creep and so it was split into two smaller projects. The first, Project 11, will focus on more pressing issues such as the need for cache busting functionality as well as the poor startup performance of the website when the database goes dormant.  Additionally, it will be addressing concerns with the current code organization and the removal of line feeds and carriage returns from the content data. The second, Project 12, will be about revising the Javascript development environment using Jest to add automated unit testing.

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JavaScript Revisited

JavaScript Framework, et al.

So the most recent project, Project 10, started with the simple goal of creating a dataset editor using React and Redux.  Not too ambitious but enough to get familiar with the framework and associated technologies.  This quickly became more of a challenge than I anticipated, in particular attempting to integrate this new flavor of JavaScript with the PHP backend.  Most of the resources I found came from the perspective that the entire website would be React / Redux and it took some time to figure out how to get it to play nicely with PHP providing most of the HTML content.

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Vanilla Javascript

Starting with the Basics

A lot of time and consideration went into deciding on the hows and whats of the first sizeable JavaScript project.  Working with JavaScript can at times feel like trying to nail jello to a wall.  So much is permissible.  There is no typing, objects can be created on the fly without a class, JavaScript will happily create any or all variables as global and code will die quietly in the background without raising a fuss.

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