So what’s the difference?

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform that was developed as a way to add animation, video, audio, and other interactive elements to web pages. Viewing Flash content requires the use of a free plug-in. Developers must embed the Flash content into the HTML document, which means that the Flash content is independent of the other content on the page.

JavaScript is a lightweight, and open-source scripting/programming language designed to add interactivity to HTML pages. Unlike Flash, support for JavaScript is built right into all major web browsers without the need for additional plug-ins. JavaScript works by manipulating HTML content, which means that all content on the page is seamlessly integrated.

Why do we use JavaScript?

Firstly, JavaScript has become immensely powerful and easy to use with the development of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc. jQuery, our library of choice, is fast, concise, and versatile. It allows us to rapidly add complex interactivity to webpages without spending a lot of time. jQuery is also an open-source project with many developers working tirelessly to improve it each day.

The Web was meant to be an open system, and to use open-source tools is to follow in that virtue. I that same vein, JavaScript/jQuery is FREE. Flash (as a tool) can be an expensive initial investment and also expensive to maintain as upgrades are released over the years.

Another problem with Flash is that the required plug-ins to support Flash content aren’t available on all platforms, namely iPhone, which means that you could be limiting your content from a huge portion of web users by using Flash. Meanwhile, jQuery works on these devices with no problem. Furthermore, even if JavaScript is disabled in a user’s browser, because JavaScript is unobtrusive in nature (integrated content), those users still have access to all of your site’s content.

Finally, JavaScript is universal. As a web project changes hands from one developer to another, no special applications are required to view or edit JavaScript files. Additionally, JavaScript is a widely known language, therefore, future modifications should be able to be made by nearly any web developer handling the project.

These are just some of the reasons we’ve chosen to use JavaScript. Hopefully next time you’re looking to add some interactive elements into your site, you’ll take a look at using JavaScript & jQuery instead of Flash.

So I went, and RubyConf was pretty awesome. It was filled with people who love the language and what can be done with it. I really liked that the conference wasn’t just about Rails, it was about Ruby in general, so I got to learn about all sorts of things that are out of the scope of what I normally do with Rails. I learned about MacRuby, a project that aims to let people write apps for the Mac (and hopefully iOS, eventually) in Ruby. This opens the door to a lot more people who want to write Mac code because they don’t have to learn another programming language.

I was highly impressed with Daniel Jackoway, a young Stanford undergrad who had lots to say about his project Ruboto, which is Ruby for Android devices. He was very knowledgeable for someone his age. It was pretty inspiring to listen to his talk.

I also learned a lot about app security and best practices for keeping your apps safe from prying eyes, and how to write more future-proof, manageable code. It’s good to plan ahead when coding so that you don’t hate yourself later on when you come back and try to decipher what you wrote and how it works. I also learned about Ruby 1.9, the latest version of Ruby, what it supports and why it’s much better than the current version of Ruby in most cases.

I even ran into some cool people who write web applications that I use every day, like Chargify.

My favorite part, however was when a Japanese programmer, Shugo Maeda gave a talk. His English wasn’t very good, and Matsumoto had to translate a lot of what he was saying. Eventually he was done with his presentation and asked if there were any questions. A guy from the audience asked a question, but both Matsumoto and Shugo had a difficult time understanding just what he was asking. Eventually, someone got the bright idea to have him come up and write code that demonstrated his question. It was amazing to see how quickly everyone in the room was on the same page when he did that. The question was quickly answered after that. It was really amazing to see a real-life example in which it was clearly shown that we might not all speak the same language, but we all understood the same language, Ruby.

All in all, it was a really fun time, much new knowledge was gained, I got to put faces to usernames that I’d only seen online, and I learned so much about what is being done with Ruby outside of Rails. RubyConf 2010 was awesome.

The conference is billed as the most prominent Republican event prior to the next national convention. Top Republican law makers from around the country are expected to be at the conference in June 2011.

Another useful aspect of going with Rails for a web project is that you’re using a framework which tons of other people use as well, which enables you to use plugins created by the community. That also saves you a lot of time and programming effort. For instance, most web applications are going to need some sort of login system. With Rails, you can either build your own custom solution, or you can choose from a bunch of plugins which are well documented and tested for security issues because of all the other people programming with Rails. As of right now, the number of plugins for Rails is well into the hundreds of thousands. Basically, anytime that you decide you’d like to do something that other people might have a use for too (connecting to Facebook, Twitter, uploading images, etc), chances are pretty good that it has already been written. Also, another benefit of using a framework that lots of other people use is that as a developer, it’s pretty easy to look at a Rails app you didn’t write and quickly figure out what’s going on, because the layout of the app is familiar.

Then, you can’t mention Rails without mentioning Ruby, the programming language that it was built on top of. Ruby is a young language, built by a Japanese developer named Yukihiro Matz Matsumoto, and released in 1995. It is elegant, concise (in general, it takes a lot less Ruby code to get something done than it would in another language), and it’s easily readable/understandable compared to other languages.

These things combine to make Ruby on Rails our number one choice at Gatorworks for building web applications. It lets us get things done and go from idea to code in less time than anything else we’ve used.

Here are some projects that we’ve developed using Ruby on Rails:

• Go See Campus: http://www.goseecampus.com
• Event Connect: http://www.eventconnect.org
• Tiger Bookmarket: http://www.tigerbookmarket.com

Here is a quick tour of the main areas of the site:

Once the child creates an account, he/she will be greeted by the elf and see this home page. This is Santa's Island where the child can begin their journey!

If the child clicks on the snowman, he/she will see a naked snowman with a box that contains various articles of clothing and accessories. The child can click and drag the items over to the snowman to create one of their own. If an article of clothing doesn’t look just right, then the child can drag the item over to the trash can to remove it.

We decided to make a cowboy, bowler Snowman!

If the child goes over to Santa’s Mailroom, he/she will see a very active room with letters being sucked down a pipeline and being dropped into a pile in the center of the room. A friendly elf is quickly sorting the letters into “naughty” or “nice” pipelines that go directly to Santa’s office. If the child clicks on the colored letters on the ground, he/she can read a letter written from other children to Santa.

The Elf in Santa's Mailroom quickly sorts letters from children across the world.

Santa’s Toy Factory is my favorite part of the website. This is where children can see the worker elves in action making plenty of toys. There’s a countdown to Christmas on the wall at the top right, and the child has the option to click on a toy of their choice on the conveyor belt. If the child clicks on a toy, a window will pop-up that pulls the actual image of the product from Amazon. Then, the child has the option to add the toy to his/her “wishlist.”

Toys are quickly being assembled by elves in Santa's Toy Factory.

The final component of the site allows the child to email Santa Claus, and the child has the option to include items in the email that they selected from Santa’s Toy Factory.

So, as you can see, this was a rather involved project that required a great deal of custom illustration and then custom animation (and action script) using Adobe Flash. We were very excited to win an ADDY for this project at the 2010 awards show this year.

I invite you to visit the actual site so you can see these screenshots come to life and hear the jolly Christmas music we have playing in the background. If you have children, I encourage you to let them visit the site and have some fun next Christmas!

Do you like this site? Check out some other completed projects by our award-winning team.

Check out a small sampling of some of the websites we’ve designed, developed, and maintained throughout the last year.

Giraphic Apparel: http://www.giraphicapparel.com

Giraphic Prints: http://giraphicprints.com/

Giraphic Blog: http://thinkgiraphic.com/

Hoist & Crane Service Group: http://www.hoistcrane.com/

LA Office of Juvenile Justice:  http://www.ojj.la.gov

LA Dept. of Veterans Affairs: http://www.vetaffairs.la.gov/

Louisiana Finance Assoc: http://www.louisianafinanceassociation.com/

Metropolitan Gastroenterology Assoc: http://www.metrogi.com/

Republican Party of LA: www.lagop.com

Rotolo’s Restaurant: http://www.rotolos.com/

Santa’s Online Wishlist: http://www.santasonlinewishlist.net

Southern Republican Leadership Conference: http://www.srlc2010.com

Stein Engineers: http://www.steinengineers.com

Surgir Real Estate Development: http://www.surgirllc.com/

The Tradewind Report: http://www.tradewindreporting.com

Tiger Bookmarket: http://www.tigerbookmarket.com/

VasoCare Healthcare: http://www.calmrestlesslegs.net/

VoxBox: http://www.yourvoxbox.com

Zymeaux Mobile Marketing: http://www.zymeaux.com

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.

Arriving in our hotel on Sunday night was such a relief. We had just driven 26+ hours from Baton Rouge to Boston. The conference was worth it.

Monday we got to hear some excellent presenters like Jared Spool, Kristina Halvorson, Jeremy Keith, Dan Cederholm, and Jason Santa Maria among others. Tuesday we were privy to the presentations of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Mall, Simplescott, Heather Champ, and Andy Clarke. The knowledge flowed like a river. I would love to be able to share everything I learned but I’m afraid there’s just not enough space on the internet for that. (Heh, there actually may be.)

But some really key points I picked up on from the conference are:

• Doing it just like Amazon.com does it, is not necessarily the best solution for everyone.- You have to have to traffic to sustain the type of site that amazon has, and amazon has millions of pageviews a day. Searching for something obscure on amazon typically doesn’t wield helpful results, you need a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for.
• Content is not a feature.- Content generally gets overlooked and we as web developers have been trained to accept the “put-off” of content until the final stages of the site. When, ideally, the content should all already be assembled and ready to go before the structure and architecture of the site are completed.
• Be bold, use structure, and sketch ??????? ????????? ????? ?????? ????????? 2
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  - Jason Santa Maria talked about the marginalization of design not due to inability, but due to fear and lack of process. He strongly emphasized using a grid structure, the types of grids to use, and the power of sketching.

• Sketching is not about what kind of artist you are but about the flow of information and ideas. Once you exhaust all the normal and conventional ideas you’re forced to think outside of the norm.
• We need to plan for the future. The DISTANT future.- Jeremy Keith talked about planning for the future through our CSS and using fluid layouts, jquery, and javascript. Cool URI’s don’t ever change. It was really a talk about your legacy on the web, and how the argument could be made that not only are screens getting bigger, they’re getting much more varied. So when you’re coding a site, you need to allow it to adapt to the future.
• Web Designs should ultimately lead back to user interface and usability. If something isn’t producing a good number of clicks, find out why and fix it.
• Test, Retest, and Evolve -  Simplescott creative director for the Obama Campaign’s website showed us the entire process he went through while working on Obama’s site. The key point communicated was that through testing, and evolution eventually a final was approved, and through user testing they could see that it was an easily navigable site.
• The fold is dead. – Everyone has a mousewheel now. The day when we needed to worry about what fit on the very first part of the screen is over. People will scroll down, and they will see your content.
• Make lemonade out of lemons -  Heather Champ (Community Manager at Flickr) had a great story about how when their site crashed, they ran an impromptu creativity contest with just 2 circles as the original idea. The users of the site then went to all ends of the spectrum and created some really cool effects (rather than freaking out about flickr being down). It’s a testament to ingenuity and finding ways to turn a bad situation into a good one.
• Re-engineer your workflow. Make mockups in browsers not photoshop. – Andy Clarke dropped this bomb on us as the last presenter. Making mockups in browsers is so unconventional and yet, after he really explained the process it makes  sense. It can clearly communication subtle web behaviors like hovers, javascript, and more. And if the client wants a sitewide color change, one line of css fixes that rather than changing a whole mockup.

I walked away from An Event Apart with all my premonitions and expectations annihilated. It was the most inspiring moment of my career. I would personally like to thank @brianrodriguez for sending me, because it is truly something I won’t forget.