Sorry about being a little late but I have been swamped for the past several days. I will try to be more prompt in the future. In this posting I am going to talk about JavaScript objects.

For those of you who have not done any programming an object is a way of combing data, called properties, with the actions that affect that data, called methods. There is a set of special methods that reacts to external actions called events. Events may be standard events like click or a custom event you define. This may seem a little abstract so let's provide a more concrete example. Let's use a person. A person has physical characteristics like hair color, eye color, height, etc. these are the properties. People can also do things like walk, eat, drink, etc. these are the methods. An external event may be a tickle. So when the tickled event fires then execute the person's laugh method. This is the basic idea of object programming.

I have, and for the next several postings will be discussing JavaScript. Drupal makes extensive use of this language. Drupal even includes a tightly coupled JavaScript library of its own called drupal.js, this aside from the more general jQuery library. I am going someplace in this series so keep on coming. I think you will find the end result interesting. So let's get on with the next in this series.

JavaScript is a strange language in many ways but I thought I would focus on the particularities of JavaScript's logical operators || (or) and && (and). If you are coming from most other languages you are expecting these operators to return a boolean (true, false) value. In JavaScript this is not the case.

In branching (if statements) and iteration (looping statements like while) it is important to understand how these statements determine whether to branch or continue the loop. This subject concerns both of Drupal's primary programming languages, PHP and JavaScript. What is interesting is that this is not necessarily a boolean(true, false) evaluation. The two states are more accurately called truthy and falsey.

JavaScript is gaining increasing importance in web development today. This is for several reasons. First, it is the only client scripting language that has been implemented in one form or another across all of the major browsers. It can be used to provide animation, manipulate your HTML, change your CSS, and send communications to the browser without form submission. As discussed in my previous posting, JavaScript is important in Drupal as well. For the next several postings I will be talking about JavaScript so it may be useful for you to know at least a basic method of attaching JavaScript to your site.

"How does jQuery fit into Drupal?" I was surprised by this question a few weeks ago by someone in another area of information technology. This question may be more fundamental than just a question about a particular technology. This reveals that there may be a fundamental misunderstanding about how web applications work, including Drupal. This surprised me because the person asking the question had been making many valuable contributions to a Drupal web project for several months. This should not have been such a shock. To many people Drupal is their first introduction to web application development and design. But in my next several blog entries I will be discussing some technical details of several of Drupal's underlying languages. Before jumping into the deep water, I thought it might be helpful to allow some of you to get your toes wet by discussing some fundamentals.

Cron is a daemon that runs in the UNIX/Linux environment. Windows has a similar feature called Scheduler.  In Drupal these features are used by a script called cron.php to do several important functions.  The most obvious of these functions is to check for updates to modules or Drupal core.  The setup for cron and an alternative called poormanscron is well described at http://drupal.org/cron.  For most installations this is probably ok but in hosted environments I have had problems.  Using the instructions provided I had trouble setting this up on several hosts. I tried several solutions and could not figure it out at first.  Well I finally found the answer and as with most problems of this sort the answer is deceptively simple.  Just realize that cron.php is a php program and called PHP directly.

Last November, PHP did something that was great.  They released PHP 5.3.  Why great?  PHP 5.3 introduced some major improvements to the language, not the least of which was namespacing.  There was however a big catch, Drupal did not play well in the new environment.   This has been addressed in the Drupal Core but many major modules have yet to resolve issues this upgrade caused. It has been almost 8 months since this release we seem to be stuck in time.  Many say "Look at the requirements Drupal supports 5.2 nothing is said about 5.3".  Fair enough but let's think this through.

Hello this is the first of what I hope to be many posts in the future. I think I should start by telling you what Bennu Bird Media is all about. This company arose from a project to aid an organization of unemployed professionals in the Sacramento area called the Sacramento Professional Network. This was an unusual project in many ways.  I think the best explanation can be found in the first thing I wrote when in Requirements Discovery.