This section demonstrates the use of technologies that I have not yet used professionally.
JavaScript
This site uses JavaScript for a number of purposes. Primarly there are the menus which can be found at the top of each page. The code for this was copied from TwinHelix. However it has been customised to add the "under construction" popup icon when the mouse is over a non-functioning menu item (see other -> Panoramas -> Introduction).
JavaScript is also used on the front page to generate the "welcome", "whats new" and "Quote of the day" sections. All of these use cookies to record when the page was visited. The "Welcome" text is generated depending on how many times the visitor has visited the site. For "whats new" a list of changes since the last visit is output. The "Quote of the day" is randomly selected on a daily basis. These are simple scripts, written by me.
XML & XSLT
This is a set of files used to produce a Contact List from XML data. The data is contained in contact.xml. The XML schema is "standalone" so there is no separate Document Type Definition(DTD), instead it is included at the top of contact.xml. The transformation of the XML data into a HTML document is defined using Extensible Stylesheet Language(XSL). Instructions contained in contact.xsl (included from contact.xml) produce the HTML and process the XML data so it is included at the appropriate points in the document.
I have used two ways to process the XML, first using the free Saxon XSLT processor invoked via contact.bat. This produces a permanent contact.html file containing an HTML document that can be viewed with a browser. The other way is to open contact.xml using Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is able to process the XML and XSL files producing a temporary HTML document which it then displays.
The final file in the package contact.css contains Cascading Style Sheet information which defines the format of the document.
SOAP & Web Services
This package contains a web page that makes use of web services and SOAP to do online spell checking. The service used is the Google Web Serice API. Unfortunately the Google terms of service prevent me from displaying the results on these pages so you will have to download and view the file GoogleSearchPort.html yourself. The demonstration makes use of the JavaScript SOAP Client from Systinet to compile Google's (Web Services Description Language) file into the corresponding JavaScript. The demo has only been tested with IE6. Please note that the Sysinet compiler and Google web service are both beta products and that the web service may not continue to be available in the future.
Last modified: Fri Apr 26 12:54:08 GMT Daylight Time 2002