Ok over the last week here I’ve put in some more development effort and have updated the Dev Sneak Peek to version 1.1!

I’ve completed all of the tables in the database and have loaded the rest of the test data for the issues. Granted this is just test data and I cannot go live with it, but here are the stats…

• publishers – 100
• series (aka titles) – 20,401
• issues – 271,797

New functionality includes when you select a Title from the Series List on the left, the Series info is displayed on the top right and the list of issues for the selected Title is displayed on the lower right.

So what you ask? Good question… This screen represents what the main maintenance access screen will look like. You will come to this screen when you want to add a new issue or edit an existing one. I’ve still got to do some fine tuning of the Issue list, like formatting the columns, for example displaying the cover price as $2.95… There’s some other tweeking that I’d like to do to.

So try it out and leave a comment to this post to tell me what you think!

Update 2: Figured out the issue with IE 6, the dev sneak peek now works with IE. Apparently IE is slightly more picky when it comes to JavaScript Objects ending with a trailing comma than the other web browsers out there… go figure!! Also spruced up the dev sneak peak and added a couple of things here and there.

Update 1: Note, the dev sneak peak currently does not work in IE 6, not sure about IE 7 or 8 – some one try it and let me know. Works in FireFox, Chrome and Safari for Windows

I’ve finally gotten something that looks half way decent and works! Check out the new menu item for the ‘Dev Sneek Peek’ on the left on the main site or just click here: Comic Book UPC Database Dev Sneak Peek. Once the application launches, click on the help button for instructions. The Sneak Peek allows you to select the publisher, enter a partial title and perform a serach against the ‘demo’ data that I have loaded.

Please let me know what you think by sending feedback to the development team

Well I’ve spent the last 2 days creating some of the various database tables and importing some data for publishers and series (aka titles) from an external source. This proved trickier than expected due to the source of the data containing non-ASCII characters such as curly quotes, accented characters, ellipses, etc. (see my previous post on my Tumblr).

Ended up dropping the whole database after exporting the table definitions and some of the reference type data that I had entered via phpMyAdmin. Then I recreated the database using UTF8 as the character set. Still had some minor tool issues with the mysql command line program – using this to get the data into the MySQL database. What ended up fixing it was using the –default-character-set option to mysql.

mysql --default-character-set utf8 -u USERID -p cb_upc_db < data.sql

You start getting the SPAM comments. Its a good thing to see, but a pain to deal with. I had to delete 15 plus comments today.

Here’s a post I just wrote on my Tumblr about Multilingual support, character sets and collating sequences. It wont be appealing to most, just programmers out there that have to deal with this stuff.

I’m not saying I want to support different languages for this application, but I just need to be able to deal with content that may contain characters from non-ASCII characters sets! Like n-tilde or whatever.

Major pain in the butt!

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing the last several days… it been trying to learn Ext JS on my own. Not a easy task, but I’ve been making progress. Though not fast enough to suite my tastes, so I went and got some books on learning EXT JS. Will post my thoughts on them later after I have read some more. Here’s what I’ve got:

• Ext Js 3.0 Cookbook
• Ext JS in Action
• Learning Ext JS
• Practical Ext JS Projects with Gears

Starting with Learning EXT JS first…

Well, when looking for a JavaScript library to add some utility to the web site, I stumbled upon Ext JS – not only does Ext JS provide many cross browser abstractions for various DOM functions it also has this really awesome UI library. So I have decided to develop the database maintenance part of the web site completely in Ext JS. Give the Ext JS UI Component Demos a look if your the developer type.

Here’s one example of what is possible with Ext JS.

I’d like to say hi to an old friend of mine, Steve Behling…. Steve, if you read this leave a comment!

Thanks,

– Greg

Added some additional content to the web site tonight. I added a project details page that give a little more information on what the project is about and its benefits.

Trivial as it may seam I found a favicon.ico that looks like a UPC Bar Code for the web site! Yeah me!