Wheel 2.0: Jason Huck’s Devblog

Officially, Lasso Professional is only supported on one flavor and version of linux: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. However, many Lasso users have opted to forego RHEL4, which requires a commercial support subscription, for its community supported twin, CentOS 4, despite the fact that it isn’t officially supported by LassoSoft. Because CentOS 4 is based [...]

At the 2008 Lasso Developer Conference in Chicago, I presented a paper entitled Server Side Techniques for Client Side Optimization, in which I reviewed the original 13 Rules For Making Web Sites Fast from Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance Team. These rules quickly became the seminal document on the topic of client side optimization and have since [...]

Practically out of nowhere yesterday, it was leaked that Google was working on their very own web browser called “Chrome”, and already today a beta is available for Windows, with Mac and (hopefully) Linux versions to follow. I won’t go into the details of Google’s motivations for developing Chrome, or the specific ways in which [...]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing for this year’s Lasso Developer Conference in Chicago. It’s my second time speaking at the event, and although it’s not until September, a written paper and demo materials which will accompany the presentation were due July 1st are due July 14th (thanks to LassoSoft for the gracious [...]

Despite numerous requests, I have either been too busy or too lazy, or both, to update my gaTracker plugin to support the new ga.js script from Google Analytics. Hence, I am very interested in trying out dvdsmpsn’s jGoogleAnalytics plugin, which not only converts my original plugin to work with ga.js, but also adds a slew [...]

Cory S.N. LaViska over at A Beautiful Site has created a very nice jQuery plugin for displaying file trees called, naturally, jQuery File Tree. The great thing about it is its simplicity. It doesn’t have an overabundance of bells and whistles, but it’s super easy to integrate with a simple API (it even includes Lasso [...]

As a followup to my previous post on creating comboselect boxes in jQuery, I have automated the process of transforming a normal multiselect input element into a comboselect with the (aptly named) comboselect plugin. With the plugin, you start with a normal select input, and transform it using a few simple options. You can decide [...]

This article describes different ways to load custom tags into memory in Lasso, and presents an alternative method of managing tag libraries. LassoStartup and LassoLibraries Lasso provides a number of different ways to make custom tags (and types) available for use in your scripts. Tag definitions can be pasted directly into scripts, or included from [...]

Although the standard <select> input for HTML forms supports a “multiple” attribute which allows users to select multiple options by control- or command- clicking, it’s easily one of the most confusing concepts for users to grasp. It’s also fairly clumsy, especially when the list of options is long. It’s difficult for users to see which [...]

An important aspect of web application design is error management. Many factors outside a developer’s control can cause problems, even if the deployed code is free of syntax errors, from changes in the underlying subsystems to edge cases in user input that haven’t been accounted for, to remote services that stop responding. It’s the responsibility [...]