jQuery: calendar and datepicker plugins

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Holidays time - short post. I hope you find it useful.
Now on with the calendar and datepicker jQuery plugin parade!

wdCalendar – jQuery Based Google Calendar Clone
"wdCalendar is a jquery based google calendar clone. It cover most google calendar features. User can choose to have a daily view, weekly view or monthly view. User can easily create, update or remove events by drag & drop. It is very simple to to integrate wdCalendar with a database.
wdCalendar is free (open source LGPL license), easy to use, and with great functionalities."

Event Calendar
"Event Calendar is a jQuery and ColdFusion event calendar that works a lot like the Google Calendar system. With Event Calendar, you can share calendar information throughout your organization. There is also a simple user facade, that you can extend, to help control user rights."

jQuery.calendarPicker
"This component is a light-weight calendar/date-picker.
Some features:

• supports internationalization (supports do not necessary means it is implemented:-) )
• supports changing current date
• supports mouse wheel scrolling
• supporting (deferred) callback on date selection
• supports variable number of years, months and days
• supports next/prev arrows"

Date Picker - jQuery plugin 
"Date Picker component with a lot of options and easy to fit in your web application."

FullCalendar
"FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event). It is open source licensed under an MIT license."


jQuery Datepicker
"A jQuery plugin that attaches a popup calendar to your input fields or shows an inline calendar for selecting individual dates or date ranges."

Multiday Calendar Datepicker JQuery Plugin
"Multi-day, multi-month animated datepicker jQuery plugin that weighs in at 14KB with the uncompressed development version."

jQuery Frontier Calendar 
"Full month calendar jQuery plugin that looks like Google Calendar."

jQuery UI datepicker

Calendario
"Today we want to share a flexible calendar concept with you. Calendars can be a very tricky thing when it comes to their layout and responsiveness. This is an experiment for trying out some grid layouts that can be applied to calendars. We’ve created a jQuery plugin for the calendar itself and you can see some examples of how to use it in the demos. The aim is to provide a suitable layout for both, small and big screens and keeping the calendar structure fluid when possible. On large screens we want to show a grid-based layout while on smaller screens, we want to simply stack the days of the month."

Happy Easter

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Relational databases: some simple rules (part 2)

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This is the second part of the two parts article "Relational databases: some simple rules".

In the first part we have seen the ideas of tables and the way we can relate them.
And now... the conclusion!

Primary and foreign keys
We now need to move on a bit, but please keep in mind the example made in the first part of the article: two tables, with a relation for the state column.
The names table has the following columns: ID, name, surname, address, post code, city, state.
The states table has the following columns: ID, state.
In the persons table, the “state” column will contain only IDs related to the states table.
The ID column in the person table is a primary key. The ID in the state table is a primary key.
The “state” column in the persons table is a foreign key.
Quite easy, isn’t it?

Relational databases: some simple rules (part 1)

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It doesn't matter what we prefer to use, either Ms Access or SQL Server or Oracle, or even MySql, but when we want to create a new database, we really need to consider its structure, plan it and finally create all the database elements.
To do such a thing might seem easy – and in general it is – but a good development plan is what we need to avoid pitfalls and future issues with the structure of the database. The complexity of a database is surely one of the things to be considered, in fact it is clear that a more complex database will surely be more complex to develop.
Some simple rules can be taken into account and in this two parts article we are going to see some important points we need to keep in mind when planning a new database.

CSS3: border-image

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With CSS3 we can use images as border of an element. Apart from using the normal border styles already available in CSS, we can now make our web pages more colourful and attractive (if you really like colours and shapes!).
Just to go directly to the core, we can use the following style for, let's say, all divs in a document:

div
{
-webkit-border-image:url(myborder.png) 30 30 round;
-o-border-image:url(myborder.png) 30 30 round;
border-image:url(myborder.png) 30 30 round;
}

The border-image property is in fact a shorthand property. As you can see from the above example, we are using different values which are:
1) border-image-source which is the path to our image;
2) border-image-slice which is the inward offsets of the image;
3) border-image-width which is the widths of the image;
4) border-image-outset which defines the portion of the image that goes beyond the box;
5) border-image-repeat which sets the way the image will be repeated.

ASP: conditional statements with If...Then...Else...ElseIf

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In ASP we can use conditional statements in different ways. The basic syntax we are used to, is If ... Then ... Else ... End, however we will see that there are some interesting things about it.

First of all let's consider a simple conditional statement in ASP. As you already know, we do not use any brackets or parenthesis. A basic example could be:

<%
Dim numVar
numVar = 5
If numVar = 5 then
  response.write("The variable numVar is 5")
End if
%>

HTML5: geolocation

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With HTML5 is now possible to use the target browser in order to determine the location from which the user is accessing the web. It is not, as you may understand, a GPS location (unless the user is surfing from a GPS capable device), but it can be quite interesting in some cases where special services are supplied on a web page.

How can we develop a geolocation service on our web page?

Well, first of all try and see the final effect: go here and enjoy. After that, please get back on the web thought...

First of all let me say that all location services on the target browser must be granted by the user. As you may have noticed by visiting the above live example, the browser has asked you permission for the use of location services (unless you've granted permanent access to your location).