thewebfellas - uk ruby on rails development

We've got a couple of projects on the go right now where a Facebook style multi-select (with or without autocomplete) is a good fit for making the user interface more, err, useable.

As ever, searching around there are a number of options - especially given the number of Javascript frameworks around. For us, things are also complicated by the fact that not all our projects use the same Javascript libraries - we're not always responsible for the front-end code and as such some clients already have a dependency on, or a preference for a given library.

Let’s say we have a JavaScript function that looks like this:

function plot(options) {
  options = options || {};
  this.onUpdate = options.onUpdate;

  //
  // more code to do something interesting
  //
}

Last week I had the fun of trying to fix what appeared to be random InvalidAuthenticityToken exceptions coming from a page using Ajax requests. I eventually tracked the problem down to this snippet of JavaScript (and in my defence I didn't write the code, honest!):

I’ve always enjoyed a kind of love/hate relationship with JavaScript, something which I think stems from my early exposure to using it on Microsoft platforms in the late 90’s, using half-baked debuggers, inconsistent browsers and a huge degree of trial and error. It’s not that I can’t write clever things in JavaScript, just that it’s not my most favourite job: if I can delegate to someone else I usually will!

Last week I was left with no choice but to roll up my sleeves and get coding: I was putting together a financial trading application prototype for one of our new clients and wanted to use JavaScript and JSON to periodically update pricing information.

So today I found myself in need of a WYSIWYG editor for the admin pages of the site I’m currently working on. I’ve used FCKEditor and Scott Rutherford’s Rails plugin before and Chris has recently been using TinyMCE for a few of our other projects but both of them seemed too heavy, especially when the project requirements only stated a need to apply simple formatting like bold, italic and headings.