With the help of this post, you should be able to create pretty awesome websites using the full web development stack!
We’ve come pretty far by now! We’re almost there actually. After reading this post, you should be able to create pretty awesome websites using the full web development stack! So what’s left for us to discover? We have seen we can build dynamic websites on the back end using PHP, but what about being dynamic once the page is loaded? Well that’s where JavaScript comes into play!
- Web development #1: Internet and the World Wide Web
- Web development #2: Our first website using HTML
- Web development #3: Styling our page with CSS 3
- Web development #4: PHP in the back
- Web development #5: User input with HTML Forms
- Web development #6: Getting interactive with JavaScript
- Web development #7: Dynamic page updates with AJAX
- Web development #8: Where to go from here
The websites we’ve build were all pretty amazing. We’ve started simple using just HTML, added some CSS, then we added some dynamic content and we could even upload our own content. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty amazing. However, I still feel like our pages are missing a little… schwung! How about highlighting buttons, sliding content in and out of our page? Just some fancy visuals that will make our website stand out. JavaScript comes to the rescue.
As an added bonus, we can make calls to our back end without refreshing the entire page using AJAX. More on that later, let’s look at some fundamentals first.
JavaScript Fundamentals
JavaScript has been around since 1995. It’s easy to learn, but hard to master. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the syntax because it looks (and behaves) a lot like PHP, including truthy and falsey). I’m just going to write code. Try to keep up. I’m still writing in Notepad++ by the way. We also won’t be needing XAMPP to run basic JavaScript in this post (we’ll be needing it later for AJAX though).
One thing you should know about JavaScript is that, like CSS, it can be embedded into your HTML. But we don’t want that. In my post about CSS, we learned to keep HTML and CSS separated, which makes it easier for you to remodel your page by simply replacing some CSS files. We’ll use the same approach for JavaScript.
So let’s take a look at our first example. Yes, it’s going to be Hello world! Not the most exciting example, but you’ll see JavaScript in action. So we start out by creating a very simple HTML file. Call it whatever you like.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My first JavaScript!</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<button onclick="sayHello();">Press me!</button>
<p id="output"></p>
</body>
</html>
And now in the same folder, create a file called MyJS.js. Inside it, put the following code:
function sayHello () {
var output = document.getElementById('output');
output.innerHTML = 'Hello JavaScript!';
}
So let’s look at both the HTML and JavaScript. First in the header of the HTML, you’ll notice I’ve added a script element. In this element, I define the type and src attributes. Pretty straightforward I think. Your HTML now simply loads the specified JavaScript. In an actual server-client environment, this means that the JavaScript files are sent to the client together with the HTML page.
Other than that, we see a button element with an onclick event. Now whenever the user presses a button, an event fires. An event is simply a notification you can subscribe to. In this case, we subscribe by specifying onclick and telling it we want the function sayHello to be executed.
Now this function, sayHello, is defined in our MyJS.js file. It does the following. We declare a variable called ‘output’ using the var keyword. We assign it the result of a function called getElementById that takes a string as input parameter and is defined on something called document. Now your document is a variable that your browser gives to you and it represents your HTML content. So we’re almost literally saying “document, give me the element with id ‘output'” and guess what it returns? Yes, our p element with id ‘output’! Now that we have our paragraph, we can alter it any way we see fit. In this case, I’m simply going to give it the text “Hello JavaScript!”.
There’s more functions like getElementById, like getElementsByName() and getElementsByClassName(). Once you have an element, you can get its child elements (using children()), its parent element (using parentElement()), its ‘neighbouring’ elements (using previousSibling() and nextSibling()) and much more. What we’re basically doing is traversing and altering the DOM (Document Object Model, or your HTML document).
Now here’s why I like and dislike JavaScript. It took me about fifteen minutes to get this example running… Fifteen!? Yes. Why? Because I spelled ‘innerHTML’ as ‘innerHtml’ and what does JavaScript do? You might say it gives us an error saying innerHtml does not exist. Wrong, what it actually does is create innerHtml on the ‘output’ variable (or more precisely the object it references). It doesn’t do anything with it, it just sits there. But in the meantime, innerHTML remains empty, my page doesn’t show “Hello JavaScript!” and I’m not getting an error of any kind.
So with JavaScript, you can actually alter already existing objects! How cool is that? Pretty cool, but it can lead to very subtle and hard to troubleshoot bugs, so be careful. That is also why you should always use the var keyword when creating variables. Failing to do so will work fine, but will actually create a property on your this object (the object, or context, you’re currently operating in).
And that’s actually all I’m going to tell you about basic JavaScript. The standard library is actually pretty difficult to work with and you’ll often deal with bugs like the one I just described. To top it off, different browsers can behave differently using the same JavaScript code. Luckily (and also a bit unlucky), there are literally thousands of libraries and frameworks that do all the hard stuff for us. One of those libraries has become so popular that it has become the de facto standard when working with the DOM, I’m talking about jQuery.
Getting Started with jQuery
There are two ways to get jQuery included in our page. One we have already seen. We get the jQuery files from jQuery.com, put them on our server (or during development our local machine) and get them in our page using the HTML script element. There are two versions you can get, the regular or the minimized version. The regular version is great for development as it is easier to debug. The minimized version has all unnecessary characters like spaces, meaningful variable names, white lines, etc. removed from the file, making them practically unreadable, but making the file a little smaller in size making it to load a bit faster on our webpage. A lot of libraries have regular and minimized versions.
For this example, we’re going to use the second method to get jQuery in our page though, which is through a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. A CDN is just some host providing you with popular files you might need, like jQuery. A possible benefit of using a CDN is that they might have servers across the globe, which means that if someone in America is using our website hosted in Europe, they could still get jQuery from a server near them. Another possible benefit is that you don’t have to host the file yourself. So if you can, use a CDN.
Popular CDNs are Microsoft and Google, so let’s go with the Google CDN.
One word of caution though. Whenever your website requests a file from any CDN, the host of that CDN may track the users of your page (they’re making a request after all). So while this is probably no problem for your personal website, it may be an issue for corporate environments where privacy and security are of bigger importance.
Let’s have a look at how our header looks with jQuery from a CDN.
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My first JavaScript!</title>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
</head>
So you see, it actually looks the same, but we’re putting a link in the src attribute. Also notice that I put jQuery above MyJS because MyJS is going to need jQuery to run. Now let’s rewrite that sayHello function we had so it uses jQuery.
function sayHello() {
var output = $('#output');
output.text('Hello jQuery!');
}
Looks weird? $ is actually a perfectly valid function name in JavaScript and jQuery is utilizing it. $ is also called the jQuery function and alternatively, you could’ve used jQuery(‘#output’). Now notice what we pass as a parameter to the jQuery function. It’s a CSS selector! Yes, you can get ANY element (or elements) on the page using CSS selectors. That’s great because we already know CSS. And when we have our output element, we set the text (the part between the opening and the closing tags) to ‘Hello jQuery!’.
Now remember that I said we shouldn’t have JavaScript in our HTML? Well, we still have our onclick event in the button tag, so I guess I lied. JavaScript doesn’t really have a simple elegant solution to this problem. But jQuery does (they made it simple)! First of all, let’s change our button tag so it doesn’t hard wire that onclick event.
<button id="btn">Press me!</button>
And next, let’s take a look at our JavaScript.
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#btn').on('click', sayHello);
});
function sayHello() {
var output = jQuery('#output');
output.text('Hello JavaScript!');
}
As you can see, I’ve added a $(document).ready(function) call to our JavaScript page. That might look arcane, but it’s really simple actually. We call the jQuery function and pass it our document. We’re getting something back which obviously has a ready function that takes a function as parameter. This function, also called a callback function, is called when the document is ready (the HTML has loaded and is ready for traversal and manipulation). We then create an anonymous function to be called. It’s really the same as our sayHello function, except that we don’t give it a name. So in this anonymous function, we get our button element and then call the on function on the result. With the on function, we can hook up events to our elements. In this case, we want the click event and we specify a function to be called when the click event fires (the button is clicked).
Here’s an alternative way of writing the above. I’m using a shorthand notation for $(document).ready by simply passing an (anonymous) function directly to the jQuery function.
$(function () {
$('#btn').on('click', function () {
$('#output').text('Hello jQuery!');
});
});
Let that sink in. Study the syntax and compare the two examples. Take a look at how I rewrote the sayHello function to an anonymous function in particular, it may help understanding what’s going on. You may also want to try rewriting this using no anonymous functions.
There’s a whole lot to jQuery that I cannot show you in this blog, but the jQuery documentation is actually pretty good, so be sure to use it!
Now I’m going to show you another trick with which you can create beautiful pages using classes and CSS. First, create a CSS file called MyStyle.css and add the following style to it:
.hovering {
color: white;
background-color: blue;
}
Now let’s create a single paragraph we want to light up once you hover your mouse over it. Don’t forget to link your stylesheet!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My first JavaScript!</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="MyStyle.css">
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p id="p">Try hovering over me!<br>
An extra line<br>
so it's easier<br>
to hover...</p>
</body>
</html>
Nothing special there. Now for our JavaScript:
$(function () {
$('#p').hover(function () {
$(this).addClass('hovering');
}, function () {
$(this).removeClass('hovering');
});
});
So we get out p element and then call the hover function which takes two functions as input. One function is called when your mouse enters the paragraph and the other function is called when your mouse leaves the paragraph (moving your icon over an element is called hovering). Now in this function, we call the jQuery function and pass it this. The this keyword is a little difficult in JavaScript. This is the context in which you are currently operating, so this can refer to the window object (the ‘general context’), to an object in which you are currently operating, or in this case the HTML element on which the hover event is fired. So when we pass the p element (this) to the jQuery function we get a jQuery object on which we can call jQuery functions, such as text or addClass and removeClass. So we’re dynamically adding classes. But since our CSS applies a certain style to those classes, we now get dynamic styling on our page!
jQuery UI
I want to show another quick example of how powerful JavaScript, and jQuery in particular, really is. For this, we’re going to need jQuery UI. Another library that’s made by the jQuery people and uses jQuery, but adds functionality specifically for your UI (User Interface). Next to a JavaScript file, the jQuery UI library makes use of a CSS file too. We can get both from the Google CDN we’ve used earlier. So here is the HTML. It looks large, but it’s quite simple.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My first JavaScript!</title>
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.3/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css" />
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.3/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="accordion">
<h3>Page 1</h3>
<div>
<p>Some content...</p>
</div>
<h3>Page 2</h3>
<div>
<p>More content...</p>
</div>
<h3>Page 3</h3>
<div>
<p>Lots of content...</p>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div id="tabs">
<ul>
<li><a href="#page1">Page 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#page2">Page 2</a></li>
<li><a href="#page3">Page 3</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="page1">
<p>Some content...</p>
</div>
<div id="page2">
<p>More content...</p>
</div>
<div id="page3">
<p>Lots of content...</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And now for some amazingly difficult JavaScript…
$(function () {
$('#accordion').accordion();
$('#tabs').tabs();
});
So check out the result with and without those two lines of JavaScript. You’ll be amazed! And that’s the power of JavaScript.
So in this post, we’ve become familiar with JavaScript and jQuery. You can build amazing websites using JavaScript. There are literally thousands of JavaScript (and CSS) libraries and frameworks. Some, like jQuery, are pretty all-round, but some are really specific about doing one particular thing. In a later blog post, I’ll point out some of the more popular ones.
Try to play around a bit with JavaScript. We’ve only scratched the surface. I haven’t even mentioned prototype, which is vital in fully understanding JavaScript.
JavaScript also adds functionality to get data from or send data to our server without having to refresh our entire page. This technology, called AJAX, is what I will talk about in my next blog post.
Stay tuned!
